LWN.net Logo

Evolutionary or Revolutionary?

Evolutionary or Revolutionary?

Posted Jun 15, 2006 13:00 UTC (Thu) by brugolsky (✭ supporter ✭, #28)
Parent article: Time for ext4?

Sadly, the discussion has tended to conflate a number of issues:

  1. Compatibility
  2. Maintainability
  3. Stability

My principal question regarding Jeff Garzik's approach is whether putting work into an Ext4 that is largely compatible with Ext3 (w.r.t. things like chattr, EA, etc.), but is really a different filesystem is worthwhile, rather than taking the lesssons learned from Daniel Phillips's Tux2, Reiser4, ZFS, and experimental work such as ext3cow, and starting from scratch to create the next-gen default Linux fs. In other words, if extents are going to go in, what bundle of features should go with it? Can the format be changed in a way that makes adding features like in-filesystem COW snapshots or checksums possible without breaking compatibility? Will such flexibility grossly hamper performance?


(Log in to post comments)

Copyright © 2012, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds