How To Move Your Linux Systems To ext4

LinucksGirl writes "Ext4 is the latest in a long line of Linux file systems, and it's likely to be as important and popular as its predecessors. As a Linux system administrator, you should be aware of the advantages, disadvantages, and basic steps for migrating to ext4. This article explains when to adopt ext4, how to adapt traditional file system maintenance tool usage to ext4, and how to get the most out of the file system."

Comments

Indulging the prefix war

[JustinOpinion]

Of course, in this case you have to balance the confusion stemming from the Tera in IT context meaning 1024 in some cases. It's worse than that. According to SI prefixes, "Tera" should mean 10^12 (1,000,000,000,000), but in common usage applied to computers it sometimes means 2^40 (1,099,511,627,776). But it also sometimes means "1024 Giga", where the Giga could be using either convention (and, for all you know, the "Mega" implied within could have been computed using either convention). So you can get a gradient of "mixed numbers" that conform to neither standard. You might say that only a non-professional would make such a stupid mistake... but on the other hand, if you see a column of numbers listed in "Gigabytes" and you want to convert them to Terabytes, what conversion factor would you use? How would you know what conversion factor the previous author had used? How could you guarantee that you were doing it right? Would you be able to confidently convert it into an exact number of bytes?

Personally, I think the whole thing is a mess, and computer professionals should be working harder to enforce a consistent scheme. Unfortunately, only a minority of computer professionals seem interested in changing the status quo confusion.

Maybe a linguist can pitch in to explain why tebibyte sounds so awful? I'm no linguist, but I don't think "Tebibyte" sounding silly is the real problem. I admit that I laughed when I first heard the binary prefixes. They sound lame. But who cares? "Quark" was silly when it was first coined. So was "Yahoo" and "Google" and "Linux" and "WYSIWYG" and "SCSI" and "Drupal" and so on... Silly names become second-nature once they are used enough.

I think the real problem is that people, inherently, are loathe to change. They are more apt to come up with rationalizations and justifications for doing things "the old way" rather than put in the work to learn (and code!) a new system. Sorry if this sounds harsh, but I find the people who say the binary prefixes "sound dumb" or say that "the current (inconsistent)* system works fine" are just coming up with excuses to avoid doing the work to use a properly consistent standard/notation.

Maybe you're right, and that if the new prefixes had sounded "cooler", then adoption would have been faster... but I'm not so sure. Even if true, it doesn't absolve any of us for allowing the confusion to persist: cool or not, we (geeks especially!) should have the discipline to use proper standards.

* The current system can be roughly described as: SI prefixes are powers of 10 everywhere except in computer science, when they become powers of 2. But only when referring to memory, and some data structure sizes, but not when referring to transmission rates or disk space (unless it's a flash drive, sometimes), and other kinds of data structures.

Re:Not for the casual user

[oddfox]

One of many reasons right here

I messed around with Ext4 for a little while on my machine (Like a couple days, just toying with it and seeing how its performance compares to Ext3 and Reiser4) a while back, like maybe a little bit before it was merged as experimental in the mainstream kernel. It is fast, backwards-compatible and extremely featureful. XFS is not a bad filesystem, but it has some problems, in my eyes. Metadata-only journaling, aggressive caching that makes it a potentially dangerous choice if you don't have a UPS, very slow metadata and deletion operations.

That's great that XFS has a lot of features Ext4 is bringing to the playing field, and has had them for a long time. To pretend, however, that the developers of Ext4 simply have a NIH syndrome is just silly and disregards the fact that there is a lot that Ext4 already provides that XFS doesn't, and even more that it will soon. You might not see what the big deal is, but really, I can assure you that it won't be very long before the new ideas Ext4 employs are in widespread use.

Here's an interesting article that really caught my eye with this: "Storage snapshot: The financial firm has more than 14 Petabytes of active storage and plans to add "several more Pbytes" within the next 12 months."