David M Williams
Thursday, 15 January 2009 07:34
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
An alpha version of Ubuntu's coming April release is now available and the results are spectacular. Ubuntu 9.04 looks set to live up to its Jaunty Jackalope monicker with the ext4 filesystem already receiving great verdicts.
Ubuntu Linux is arguably the most popular Linux distribution in the world. One of its major strengths is a straightforward release schedule with a new major version every six months without fail.
The next major release will be this April and is known as either version 9.04 or Jaunty Jackalope depending on whether you prefer a more scientific or comical title.
No matter your preference, Ubuntu’s engineers have, as always, included the latest Linux kernel to come out of Linus Torvalds’ hands.
While the kernel always includes more drivers, better performance and various bug fixes, often times these go under the radar because they are obscure, or only of niche interest, or just generally have little meaningful and measurable significance to the ordinary person in the street.
Not this time: Linux kernel 2.6.28, released on Christmas Eve 2008, delivered a stable implementation of the ext4 filesystem, and this is now included in Ubuntu’s daily development builds. It’s this filesystem which is getting geeks worldwide all steamy under their collar.
Let’s have some background, especially for any Windows’ readers who may be unfamiliar with filesystems besides FAT/FAT32 and NTFS.
“ext” was the first file system created specifically for Linux and its name stands for the “extended file system.” It came into being in April 1992.
ext actually has a history relating back to the Minix operating system. The filesystem used in Minix had a limitation of 64Mb and a filename limit of 14 characters.
Looking back today 64Mb seems a crazy limit on the size of a disk partition but you need to remember the times; for a comparison, Microsoft’s MS-DOS 3.2 operating system had only come just a couple of years earlier and it was restricted to 32Mb.
So how did we get from ext to ext4? And what's so good about ext4 anyway? Please read on ...
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