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.
The article is somewhat out of date, being almost a year old. It still talks about grabbing the source from an external tree, and mounting with the ‘ext4dev’ type, neither of which has been applicable for a while now.
About the only information is use is the feature comparison with ext3, assuming that’s still accurate.
There is a far superior article on kernel newbies which goes more into depth as to the differences and what it translates to in regards to features for end users.
I promise to mod you up as informative if you post the link
Rehdon
Here you go
http://kernelnewbies.org/Ext4
That wiki page seems to be down for the moment so you can see the cache at
http://209.85.175.132/search?q=cache:WFMwDFre65oJ:kernelnewbies.org…
Thanks! It seems you can’t moderate comments belonging to a thread where you wrote a comment though
Rehdon
http://www.kev009.com/wp/2008/12/how-to-upgrade-to-ext4-in-place/
Read comments as well.
With 2.6.29 or an up to date stable (2.6.27/28) I see no reason not to use ext4 on new FS. Upgrading is a bit precarious, so you might want to try the process on a loop file or spare FS to get comfortable but I have done it on several machines without incident. The initial fsck messages may be a bit nerve racking depending on what features you change, but it should sort out. The biggest gotcha with Fedora was regenerating the initrd. On my module-less Gentoo servers, it was a bit easier.
Backwards compatibility?
ext3 added a lot in exchange for nothing as partitions could still be read as regular ext2 from other operating systems such as Windows or BSD. This is important because ext3 and 4 features are very expensive if you just want to grab a few files as opposed to running off it.
With ext4 you lose all the backwards compatibility for very little.
“for very little”? what the hell have you been smoking – what do you define as very little?
Good lord, what is it with these negative ext4 bashers coming out of the woodworks?
I thought ext4 gave you a big performance boost for free. I think it’s nice that you can choose more performance or keep compatibility with old systems.
There has been some issues pointed out with regards to ext4 that Theodore Ts’o has addressed in the below link.
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781/com…