[ale] Ext4 adoption anyone?

James Sumners james.sumners at gmail.com
Wed Jan 21 15:21:02 EST 2009


You might give [1] a read to see if the new features benefit your
situation. I like the sound of improved performance, but I'm not sure
if I would be willing to trade mounting and Ext3 partition as Ext2.
That one feature is very handy if/when the need arises. It sounds to
me like a pure Ext4 (created from scratch) filesystem cannot be
mounted as a previous version.

I think the biggest things Ext4 has done is improve support for large
files and shortened fsck times. But JFS already excels at large files,
and fscking a JFS partition is _quick_. On my MythTV box I use Ext3
for the root file system and JFS for the file systems where I store
videos. I think this works very well.

One thing to be aware of if you decide to go Ext4 is this note from [1]:

"One very important thing to keep in mind is that __there is NOT Ext4
GRUB support__. Well, that wasn't exactly true: There is grub support,
but the grub versions used by your current distro don't support it.
There's support in the GRUB2 development branch, but only from this
commit and ahead. There are available grub2 packages in Ubuntu and
debian-derived distros as the grub-pc package. In the 0.9x branch,
there's not official support, but there's a Google SoC project that
developed support for it, and Google finds patches. So choose
yourself. The next release of distros based in Linux 2.6.28 will
probably have support in one way or another. The safe option is to
keep your /boot directory in a partition formatted with Ext3."

[1] -- http://kernelnewbies.org/Ext4

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 2:49 PM, Preston Boyington
<preston.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Various bits have been spoken about Ext4 on one of the Debian lists I
> follow and I was wondering if anyone "here" was testing it on their system.
>
> Currently I am using laptops mainly, but have most things ready to build
> a desktop unit.  I am seriously considering trying it on the desktop
> system when it is together.  Thoughts?
>
> Thanks folks,
> Preston


-- 
James Sumners
http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
CH:D 59


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