Follow the Australian Telecommunications scene NEWSLETTER- FREE TRIAL
 | |
|
Technology news and Jobs 
The Linux distillery Ubuntu 9.04's blazing boot times
The Linux distillery Ubuntu 9.04's blazing boot times | Ubuntu 9.04's blazing boot times |
|
| by David M Williams | |
| Thursday, 15 January 2009 | |
|
Page 2 of 3 ext offered disk partitions up to 2Gb and filenames of up to 255 characters, but it still had problems – there wasn’t any support for file modification timestamps, for instance.Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
Over time, ext was again enhanced with the result being the logically-titled ext3 filesystem. One feature included in ext3 was journaling which on the one hand improves reliability and eliminates the need to check the file system after an “unclean shutdown” (ie a crash or power failure.) On the other hand, however, journaling decreases the performance of the file system and is reputedly a scourge on the current fad of solid-state disk (SSD) netbooks. The life of an SSD is decreased by the number of writes and erases and journaling, due to its increased amount of disk activity, is best not used on such a drive. Make no mistake, ext3 offers vast advantages. The journaling feature of ext3 is certainly compelling in a critical environment and can be compared to the way a modern database system stores transaction logs as well as the main database itself. Nevertheless, work began on the fourth incarnation of the extended file system – ext4 – on June 28th, 2006. This product was marked stable as of Linux kernel 2.6.28 in 2008 and is now recommended for adoption. One enhancement of ext4 is that it supports truly monstrous disks with volume sizes of up to one Exabyte and individual files up to 16 terrabytes each! Another is that disk space is automatically pre-allocated when a new file is created, guaranteeing space and, importantly, in most cases contiguous space which reduces fragmentation. This has significant performance ramifications for databases as well as media streaming and other applications. Online defragmentation is built in, timestamps are measured in nanoseconds, unallocated sections of the disk are marked as such so file system checks can complete more rapidly, and journals now have checksums to add more reliability. These, and more, are things which ext4 offers. Let’s cut to the chase though: what do most people care about? For one, it’s how soon after pressing the power button that they can really get to do something on their computer. Let's check out some real figures, from a genuine experiment! CONTINUED |
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
