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VIRTUALISATION Enter ext4, the filesystem of the future
VIRTUALISATION Enter ext4, the filesystem of the future | Enter ext4, the filesystem of the future |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Wednesday, 24 June 2009 | |
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Fedora, Red Hat's community distribution, took this step with version 11 which was released recently. While some tech types have been using ext4 for months - prominent among them being kernel guru Ted T'so - it's a new toy for the rest of us unwashed masses. So what does promises does it hold out? What do the other common filesystems which Linux offers at present offer? Prominent FOSS developer Russell Coker thinks the move by Fedora is a good thing. "I have great confidence in the ability of the ext3/4 developers and Red Hat employees to determine when a filesystem is ready for release. I'll do more testing with Fedora 11 than I otherwise would simply because it has ext4," he told iTWire. "If RHEL 6 has ext4 then I will be more inclined to recommend that my clients use it than Debian/Lenny. Filesystem performance is a significant problem for many servers that I run, and ext4 offers some noteworthy benefits (particularly extents and pre-allocation which benefit database servers). I also have one server which may need more than 32,767 sub-directories at some future time, the possibility of upgrading to Ext4 and having 65,535 sub-directories could be handy in a couple of years. The faster filesystem check is a significant feature, particularly for virtual servers which may need to have multiple virtual machines perform fsck before the entire system is fully operational." Chris Samuel, who works as the systems manager for the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing, kindly agreed to do a Q and A about ext4 and filesystems in general for the benefit of the hoi polloi. iTWire: ext3 is the most commonly used filesystem by Linux distributions these days; what are the upsides and downsides of this filesystem? Chris Samuel: The ext3 filesystem has a long history, entering the kernel in 2001. It has had eight years of use, debugging and tuning and hence is considered a very stable filesystem. Its default mode has been to run very safely so that it ensures that any changes to the contents of files are written to disk before the corresponding changes to the information about those files. This is now considered unfortunate (in fact Ted T'so, one of the ext3 authors apologised for it) as it has meant that badly written applications have had their faults hidden and their bad behaviour on alternative journalled filesystems has been interpreted as being caused by buggy filesystems rather than symptoms of badly written applications. CONTINUED |
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