3 ms·
Doesn't the statement > "The ext4 driver has been able to register itself as ext[23] for quite some time now, so it's transparent." itself imply that ext4 mer
by tanderson92 11y ago
Doesn't the statement
> "The ext4 driver has been able to register itself as ext[23] for quite some time now, so it's transparent."
itself imply that ext4 merely builds on ext2/3 ? That is, there shouldn't be too much compatibility code, since 3/4 are logical extensions of ext2.
The need for a split was explained in the article and more by Linus: it wasn't incompatibility but the scary possibility for instability in a filesystem that most people used as the canonical linux filesystem.
edit: think of ext3/4 as a fully backwards compatible 'branch' that is only now being 'merged' back in.
- justizin 11y agoIIRC once you mount an ext2/3 volume as ext4, you can't go back. ext4 has made a lot of improvements, but has also had a lot of corruption issues, even if corner cases. If you don't need extremely large files or extremely cluttered directory structures, you don't _need_ ext4, though I haven't compared directly in a few years, and I suspect a lot of these stability issues have shaken out. The worst I experienced was kvm guests with ext4 filesystems stored in files on ext4 filesystems causing the not only the guest, but often the _host_ filesystem to go corrupt. Obviously, using LVM volumes or basically anything but filesystem images for production VMs would have avoided this, but the infrastructure I supported at the time already had a lot of this in place and too many other problems to solve to focus on it.
- JoshTriplett 11y agoIf you actually mount it as ext4 and enable the new features, yes. However, if you mount ext2 or ext3 using the ext2/3 implementation in the ext4 driver, that doesn't break backward compatibility with ext2/3.