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VIRTUALISATION What's new in Linux kernel 2.6.29?
VIRTUALISATION What's new in Linux kernel 2.6.29? | What's new in Linux kernel 2.6.29? |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Monday, 30 March 2009 | |
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Meanwhile, one of the other most immediately noticeable and appreciable matters that 2.6.29 brings to the table is a collection of enhancements to the ext4 file system. ext4 has received accolades for its expected blazing disk speed performance. This is, logically enough, the fourth incarnation of the ext file system that was created specifically for Linux back in April 1992. ext4 was in development from mid 2006 until the previous Linux kernel, 2.6.28, released on Christmas Eve 2008 where it was finally declared stable. As a result, it began popping up in Ubuntu daily builds and will be coming to the masses in the form of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) next month. However, ext4 has received its share of criticism. For one, it was a journaling file system and users of netbooks and other devices with solid state hard drives have legitimate concerns that journaling diminishes the lifetime of the disk. Consequently, the improvements to ext4 are numerous. Individually, these are mostly very small improvements but overall they make a mighty upgrade. The removal of mandatory journaling was contributed by the Google development team and their testing indicates this improves performance even more. Meanwhile, two new file systems are also included in the kernel. Neither of these is intended for the general end user but more for hackers. The first, Btrfs, was initially developed by Oracle and is considered by some as the next generation Linux filesystem. Its main aim is to cater for massive storage space while providing fault tolerance and easy administration. Btrfs is only in a very early implementation phase. Yet, it is included so people who are interested in such things can begin working with it and building their own work around it, or even contribute to it. This isn’t unusual; much the same thing happened with ext4. While it was only considered stable just several months ago it was included in the kernel during development. Those who wanted to use it did so, and those who didn’t even know about it weren’t adversely affected in any way. The second new file system is called SquashFS and has actually been used by many Linux distributions in the past. SquashFS is designed for general read-only filesystem use so it is of limited practical application to the bulk of users. Where it does come in handy is for Live CDs and for embedded systems. What else is new? |
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