Google Switching To EXT4 Filesystem

An anonymous reader writes "Google is in the process of upgrading their existing EXT2 filesystem to the new and improved EXT4 filesystem. Google has benchmarked three different filesystems — XFS, EXT4 and JFS. In their benchmarking, EXT4 and XFS performed equally well. However, in view of the easier upgrade path from EXT2 to EXT4, Google has decided to go ahead with EXT4."

Comments

Has Ted Cooked the Benchmarks Again?

[segedunum]

I just hope Ted T'so hasn't been cooking the ext4 benchmarks again by making data notoriously less safe with a lot of retarded default settings. With data integrity restored ext4 should perform on a par with ext3, but should do far better in filesystem in hundreds of gigabytes or many terabytes. XFS has reigned there for many years so I take the article with a pinch of salt.

Re:Google doesn't need journaling?

[evilviper]

What Soft Updates apparently does is assume that once the data is sent to the disk, it is safely on the disk. But that's not a true assumption!

Journaling, and every other filesystem, has exactly the same problem. If consistence is required, YOU MUST DISABLE THE CACHE, unless it is battery-backed, or you are willing to depend on your UPS. This is the penalty we take for devices which lie to the OS about flush operations and the like.

But if Soft Updates is so great, why is NetBSD replacing it and why did Free BSD add file system journaling alternative to UFS?

Do you ever plan to stop beating your wife?

The superior performance of soft updates, both in theory and practice, has been proven out several times.