EXT4 Is Coming

ah admin writes "A series of patches has been proposed in Linux kernel mailing list earlier by a team of engineers from Red Hat, ClusterFS, IBM and Bull to extend the Ext3 filesystem to add support for very large filesystems. After a long-winded discussion, the developers came forward with a plan to roll these changes into a new version — Ext4."

Comments

Sounds like a good idea.

[Ant P.]

This'll fill the gap between now and when Reiser4 is declared stable - some time after Duke Nukem Forever gets released.

ClusterFS

[schon]

engineers from Red Hat, ClusterFS, IBM

OK, hands up - who wants to run ClusterFS so that they can say they needed to do a "clusterfsck"?

128 bits?

[turgid]

"128 bits should be enough for anyone." - Scott G. McNealy (retired).

/me ducks.

Re:128 bits?

[maxwell demon]

Well, let's see what you can address with 128 bits. If we assume byte-addressing, it's enough for 2^128=3.4*10^38 bytes, or 2.7*10^39 bits.

Now lets assume we want to store every bit in a single carbon atom. Carbon has a specific mass of 12 g/mol, 1 mol about 6.022*10^23 atoms. So 2.7*10^39 bits would translate to 4.5*10^15 mol, or 5.4*10^16 g, which is 54 gigatonnes of carbon.

I doubt hard drives will get larger than that any time soon :-)

Pattern

[Eudial]

Ext2...Ext3...Ext4

Wait... I think I can detect a pattern. The next number has to be Ext7½!

Re:define very large

[runep]

Let me put it this way, it's a little past the average slashdot porn collection:

I think you underestimate the combination of lonely geeks, OCD, unemployment, broadband and wget.

Re:Yes but

[Anonymous Coward]

Nature 406, 10^47-10^54 (2000)

Volume 406 is really thick.

Re:Yes but

[Anonymous Coward]

"That's no moon. It's a full ZFS SAN."

Re:fsck quality

[TarpaKungs]

Nonsense. xfs_repair runs over half a dozen checks on metadata. I've done it and watched it and it is thorough. The only problem is running it on 32 bit architectures with a 13TB filesystem, when it runs out of memory address space at around phase 7. That's curable with an Operton.