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Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online)

Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online)

Posted Jan 23, 2009 20:32 UTC (Fri) by kev009 (subscriber, #43906)
In reply to: Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online) by ledow
Parent article: Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online)

Thinking NTFS on anything other than Windows is more stable than ext2,3, or even 4 is mad. The read/write is fairly recent. I've never hit bugs in any file system I've used, but Linux r/w NTFS speed is terrible to this day.

And Fat32? Not only is it behind the times and inefficient, but it too is not a native file system to Linux which would worry me a bit.


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Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online)

Posted Jan 23, 2009 20:53 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

ext4 (especially with the new disk format and new features) was only declared 'stable' by it's developers in this last kernel release. In spite of the fact that it shares three characters of it's name with more common filesystems there is a huge amount of new code in it that has not had extensive real-world testing yet. I think that we're only in the 6-9 month range since the developers started trusting their own data to it.

the fact that Fedora (a bleeding edge distro) is considering using it for it's next release (in 4 months or so) just means that they think that it's good enough to test.

this is a FAR cry from saying that it's a reliable filesystem that is production ready.

NTFS speed may be terrible, but it's been around long enough to have let experience find the bugs that the developers missed.

Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online)

Posted Jan 23, 2009 23:50 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Some additional information:

Upstream has dropped the development tag from Ext4 in the latest Linux kernel release which is a indication that they believe it is good for more wide spread usage.

Red Hat has kernel filesystem developers working on Ext 3/4, XFS and Btrfs and Fedora has supported Ext4 as a experimental option right from the Fedora 9 release. Red Hat has included Ext4 as a technology preview in the recently released RHEL 5.3 as well.

Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online)

Posted Jan 29, 2009 10:29 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

There are quite a few real-world bugs still in NTFS-3G, I just saw one this morning from an Ubuntu user. While NTFS in its Windows implementations seems very stable, NTFS-3G has had less time to mature, so it's best to limit its use if possible - e.g. for a dual boot system put most of the shared data on FAT32 so that most NTFS writes are from Windows.

NTFS has advantages when Windows is running (e.g. it supports shadow copies for consistent backups of open files) but not for Linux.

Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online)

Posted Jan 30, 2009 15:15 UTC (Fri) by szaka (subscriber, #12740) [Link]

We are not aware of any NTFS-3G bug. If you check out http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html then you can find that there are many problems which are attributed to NTFS-3G when in fact they are not related to any file system in any way.

About the maturity of the 9 years old NTFS-3G code base see http://lwn.net/Articles/316471/

Unfortunately we, NTFS-3G developers, don't share your view about the stability of the Windows NTFS driver. There are many ways to crash Windows via the NTFS file system driver. In fact Microsoft documents that system crash is expected for instance if NTFS is corrupted. This is completely unacceptable for us. NTFS-3G survives millions of fsfuzz iterations.

I think our test suite is one of the most extensive ones in the industry (it's not complete list): http://ntfs-3g.org/quality.html Besides we are maintaining the PJD POSIX file system test suit as well: http://ntfs-3g.org/pjd-fstest.html what of course our advanced driver fully passes.

Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online)

Posted Jan 24, 2009 0:59 UTC (Sat) by szaka (subscriber, #12740) [Link]

NTFS read-write is actually one of the oldest and probably also one of the most mature (I don't mean the original NTFS project from 1995 but the one which restarted in 2000). Its code base is 9 years old. The core of the write functionality is actively used since 2003 in quite many softwares. Not necessarily as a full-feature read-write driver but as part of other softwares which had a very good code coverage of the today complete driver.

We are not aware of terrible NTFS performance. Many performance related issues are documented at
http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#slow
http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#highcpu

In fact some people reported that it's sometimes faster than ext3. This is not so surprising if one compares the file system designs. Ext4 solved the ext3 performance issues. In all our recent tests ext4 performs better than NTFS-3G.

There is also a performance oriented NTFS-3G driver, mainly for consumer electronic device makers which is 3-20 times faster. On a T9300@2.5GHz it performs 1.375 GB/s write speed. No typo, it's gigabyte per second and it's still far to be fully optimized.

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