Linked by Rahul on Sat 18th Oct 2008 11:29 UTC
While Ext4 was originally merged in 2.6.19, it was marked as a development filesystem. It has been a long time coming but as planned, Ext4dev has been renamed to Ext4 in 2.6.28 to indicate its level of maturity and paving the way for production level deployments. Ext4 filesystem developer Ted Tso also endorsed Btrfs as a multi-vendor, next generation filesystem and along with the interest from Andrew Morton, Btrfs is planned to be merged before 2.6.29 is released. It will follow a similar development process to Ext4 and be initially marked as development only.
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Member since:
2007-07-27
But I wonder, does ext4 protect against silent corruption and flipped bits (due to current spikes, cosmic radiation, etc)? That is the most important issue for me. A normal hard drive always have a small percentage of flipped bits by random. The bigger the hard drive, the more flipped bits.
If ext4 protects against random bit flips, it becomes a viable alternative to ZFS indeed. All the ZFS snapshots, etc is just icing on the cake. It is the silent corruption I want to avoid on a file system.
The sad thing is, traditionally, all silent corruption is detected by the hardware, not the filesystem. Design principle: "who has the relevant information? The filesystem has. Then the filesystem should detect and correct"