Hello Techies,

It's great that now ext4 filesystem would be used in Linux.

Ext3 has become one of the most popular Linux filesystems. However, with hard drives sneaking up on a terabyte, concerns exist that ext3 won't be able to handle 21st-century storage requirements. With this in mind, the Linux kernel developers have just released the first real-world test version of ext4.
 
Andrew Morton, the well-known Linux developer, added the new experimental filesystem on Oct. 10 to the Linux kernel.
 
This new filesystem features support for storage up to for 1024 petabytes per volume. A petabyte is 250 (two to the fiftieth power) bytes. If that sounds insanely large, think again. Individual supercomputers such as Lawrence Livermore National Labs's BlueGene/L already have over a petabyte of storage and several storage networks are reputed to have well over a dozen petabytes.

Ext4 also supports extent file writing. In extent, when a file is created, it is given a contiguous area of storage. Then, when the file is written to in the future, the new information is written at the end of the earlier file. This is meant to reduce file fragmentation and improve drive performance.

Linux Fanatic!
Alok

---

Find out what India is talking about on - Yahoo! Answers India
Send FREE SMS to your friend's mobile from Yahoo! Messenger Version 8. Get it NOW