Thinking about ext4
Linux defiantly doesn’t have a lack of choice when it comes to file systems to choose form. I’ve use most of the them for my main file systems, currently I am running ext2 on /boot ext3 on /home and /, and using ext4 for my portage tree and distfiles on /usr/portage. In the past I have use reiserfs, reiser v4, jfx and xfs. They have all had their pros and cons, and I’ve have used them all on my /usr/portage. Interestingly enough, the best experience of them all is ext4. The others would become fragmented over time, since I am a bit anal about running the latest software I normally sync my tree almost daily. Most of the time every other day.so there are a lot of re-writes and small files scattered all throughout that partition. I have nothing but great performance using ext4. So much so, with the release of 2.6.28 I am thinking of moving my / partition to it.
This would give me /boot as ext2, /home as ext3 and everything else as ext4. I’ve read good things about it, it seems to handle large and small files alike with ease. I am actually pretty excited with the though of moving to it.
Hopefully my experiences will continue to be on the good side of things as I move to ext4!
Why “/boot as ext2, /home as ext3 and everything else as ext4″ ??
It not better to format everything as ext4 ?
I use ext2 for my /boot b/c it is easily readable by all boot cd’s, etc. It is also so small, there is no need for advanced file systems. All it is really doing is a loading a few files totaling no more the a few MB. My kernel image is 2.8MB and the information for grub, including my splash image is under 2MB.
As for /home as ext3. I was still leery of ext4′s stability. So leaving /home as ext3 allows for a stable filesystem holding all my documents. Then I use ext4 on / , /var, and /usr/portage.
Since this post though I have been happy with ext4 and went ahead and moved my /home to it also. I’ve been very happy with ext4. Can’t wait for btrfs to come out