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Re: ext4 stable enough to entrust it with data?



Am Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:53:43 +0200
schrieb Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de>:

> On 2009-06-30 20:40 +0200, lee wrote:
> 
> > Anyway, getting the new disks brings up the question which file
> > system to use. It seems you can convert ext3 to ext4 later, so I'm
> > thinking of using ext3 for now and maybe converting later. On the
> > first glance, there doesn't seem to be a disadvantage with doing it
> > this way.
> 
> There is, existing files will not take advantage of the new features
> of ext4 like extents.  Therefore, I would just go straight to ext4
> for new filesystems.
> 
> One caveat, though: grub(-legacy) cannot read ext4, you have to switch
> to grub2 (aka grub-pc) or use a separate ext2/3 filesystem for /boot.

If the root filesystem to should be on ext4, there are (were?) two
additional steps necessary: Adding the ext4 module to the initramfs
(/etc/initramfs-tools/modules) and adding rootfstype=ext4 to the kernel
parameters.

I think ext4 has more advantages on "data" filesystems as /home than
on / because the extents feature is AFAIK only better on larger files
and / consists massively of smaller files. An important reason to
switch to ext4 is the much shorter fsck time (important for fileservers
with large filesystems).

Andreas

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