ext4 testing in the F10 release cycle

Eric Sandeen sandeen at redhat.com
Wed Sep 3 16:19:04 UTC 2008


Hi all -

Just my semiannual plea for some ext4 testing in the Fedora beta cycle.

ext4 was a feature goal for F9, and it was close; it was relegated to a
secret-anaconda-handshake "iamanext4developer" to enable it for install
- largely due to lack of ext4 support in e2fsprogs.

With the e2fsprogs-1.41.0 release in F10, we now have an ext4-capable
e2fsprogs, with working fsck, debugfs, etc as well as mkfs.ext4 and
mkfs.ext4dev to enable the new disk format features by default.

For F10, the barrier to entry has been lowered by 14 characters - now
all you have to type on the boot prompt is "ext4" :)  and when you go to
the custom partitioning screen, you'll get the option to create ext4
filesystems at install time.

I'd appreciate any and all testing, benchmarking & feedback that people
would be willing to do.  Just getting more exposure in real-life
scenarios would be great.

As with any filesystem, I wouldn't put your only copy of your most
precious data on it - use good sense about backups etc - but ext4 has
made good progress since F9 on both stability and performance, so have
at it!

Thanks,

-Eric




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