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Ext4 Filesystem Enters Experimental Kernel Tree
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like the next version of the venerable Linux 'ext' filesystem is just around the corner. Andrew Morton has added an early version of ext4 to his 2.6.19-rc1-mm1 tree, enabling Linux to support storage volumes up to 1020 petabytes in size, and to write files in 'extents,' or contiguous, reserved areas. According to an article at Linux-Watch, ext4 will be ready for production use within six to nine months, if all goes well. On the downside, the new ext4 filesystem will offer only limited backward compatibility with ext3-aware Linux kernels."
My question is why they don't mention why it is better to use ext4 then XFS.
XFS can do 9 exabytes (exabyte = 1024 petabytes).
They mention that ext4 is not faster than other filesystems.
Ofcourse people can do whatever they want, but why not spend their time making XFS easily resizable for example?
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Well, that depends on what your expectations for the future are. I don't think it is impossible that demands on multimedia will reach high enough sometime. Let us as an example consider a movie file from the Future (tm). Given better and bigger screens (perhaps covering whole walls) a frame dimension of 3000 x 2000 pixels is not inconceivable. Each pixel might consist of three RGB values of 16 bits each. Such a movie, if two hours long and running with 25 frames / second, would require about 6.5 TB in raw format.
framedimensions = 3000 x 2000
framebytes = framedimensions x 6
moviebytes = framebytes x 25 x 60 x 120
moviebytes / 10^12 ~= 6.5