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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."
Link to Ext4 entry on Wikipedia for people who aren't familar with it (like me).
Do you realize how much porn some people have?
...who are on the lookout for a new fs to entrust with keeping their precious data: make sure to check out btrfs ( http://oss.oracle.com/projects/btrfs/ ). It's a really neatly spec'd filesystem (with all the zfsish stuff like data checksumming and so on), developed by Oracle employees under GPLv2, which will feature a converter application for ext3's on-disk-format - so you can migrate from ext3 to the much more feature-packed and modern btrfs without having to mkfs anew.
On a related sidenode: I'm very happy with SGI's xfs right now. ext\d isn't the only player in the field, so please, go out and boldly evaluate available alternatives. You won't be disappointed, I promise.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
It is unlikely the common desktop (or even, for that matter, the common server) will see appreciable performance increase with it.
Disk sizes are going up. In a few years you'll see a terabyte on a single drive. I'd also say that features like undelete, and online de-frag are important to anyone.
So while you may not see any real performance increases, that's really beside the point.
AccountKiller
Instead of waiting a few years, go to your local computer store. They should have terabyte drives now.
From what I've read, Reiser4 completely kills Ext4 in performance... then it disposes of ext4's kernel module, removes one of its redundant drives, and then cleans the free space left on its array.
All you young kids want these days is a faster, more convenient fsck.. What about the old days where fscking was about the technique, not the speed or the size...
XenoPhage
Technological Musings
But it is too verbose, and that ends up being a problem.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
This is why we have XFS. I fscked a 9TB partition is under 10 minutes. Hopefully they've done some improvements for ext4 in this area. A volume that takes days to fsck might as well just die completely.
I can tell you're a slashdotter. When most people fsck they want it to last as long as possible.
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You apparently didn't get the whole picture. It's not about single files - Reiser4 is just a better choice for partitioning your wife.
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."
"We invented personal computing." - Bill Gates