Ext4 Completes Development Phase
Linked by Rahul on Sat 18th Oct 2008 11:29 UTC
Linux 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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kragil
Member since:
2006-01-04

It won't be ready for the desktop. It is still in development.

Oracle, Red Hat, IBM and Novell want something that has even more features than ZFS (when combined with a logical volume manager).
But it will take until 2010 until you will see it in production. Maybe the next RHEL will ship it. That is just a guess though.

Reply Parent Score: 2

c0t0d0s0 Member since:
2008-10-16

Hmm .... i don't think you will see brtfs in 2010 in real production. The development of a totally new filesystem is a longer process. Just think about the time ext needed to get production ready. Or the fact that reiserfs is still suspected to loose files when loaded with millions of files. brtfs it's not like ext[1-4], which is a evolutionary development, it's something completely new.

BTW: The whole brtfs development looks like a "Oh, heck, we need something similar to ZFS ...". I hope they make a better job with brtfs as with systemtap. And i do not believe that the ZFS development will stop ... in 2010 ZFS will have more features, too.

Edited 2008-10-18 18:11 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 3

adkilla Member since:
2005-07-07

Well according to the topic above, it'll be merged into 2.6.29. So it must be ready in some shape or form to be merged into the mainstream kernel. The question is whether it'll be EXPERIMENTAL or an initial release?

I think 2.6.29 will be ready sooner than 2010.

Reply Parent Score: 1

c0t0d0s0 Member since:
2008-10-16

Surely it will be experimental. There were several comments from kernel developers, who thought about copying the ext4 process with it´s long existence as experimental code.

Filesystem are a relatively closed realm in itself (this is the reason for virtal filesystem layers) so you can even integrate bleeding edge code without harming the rest of the system.

Reply Parent Score: 3

MORB Member since:
2005-07-06

It'll be experimental. They want to merge it to increase its visibility and attract more developers.

In fact, the disk format is not predicted to be finalized until the end of the year, so if you use it before then, you'll end up with partitions that the next version of btrfs won't be able to mount.

After that it'll still not quite yet be considered stable and safe for anything more than data that you don't mind losing.

Reply Parent Score: 2

gilboa Member since:
2005-07-06

... Maybe the next RHEL will ship it. That is just a guess though.


Doubt it.
I'd venture and guess that RHEL will continue using ext3 by default, but will offer ext4 is a certain command line option is used during installation/boot.

If indeed btrfs will be released within 2010, I -may- end up in RHEL 7.

- Gilboa

Reply Parent Score: 2