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

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."