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EXT4 Is Coming

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the we're-going-five-blades dept.

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."

3 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. LWN article on ext4 by ElMiguel · · Score: 5, Informative

    LWN had an interesting article on ext4 not long ago.

  2. Re:Modularizable filesystem by Bogtha · · Score: 5, Informative

    Reiser4 does this.

    --
    Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
  3. fsck quality by r00t · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nobody has a fsck that can compare to e2fsck (ext2/ext3/etc.) for quality.

    The e2fsck program has a huge test suite that it must pass before a release. A set of corrupted filesystems must be correctly repaired to be bit-for-bit identical to the desired result.

    A typical fsck has a good chance of crashing (SIGSEGV, the "segmentation violation") when the going gets tough.

    While FreeBSD's UFS developers were messing around with sync writes to avoid testing a fsck that would often crash, the ext2 developers ran full async and wrote a damn fine fsck to put things back in order. Now you can choose from three different levels of journalling, and you still get the ass-kicking fsck program.

    There basically is no fsck for XFS, Reiserfs, or Reiser4. JFS doesn't have much AFAIK, and ZFS is a newborn.

    What are you going to do when your fancy filesystem gets trashed? I hope you keep excellent backups, very recent and tested to be readable.