Ext4

[gerard4143]

Hi,

I have a quick question about ext4. How stable is it? I ask because I heard that ext4 is new and it hasn't really been proven in the field. So is it stable?

[nmset]

I have no real experience with ext4 and what I saw some time ago about data loss/file content corruption/frozen systems made me keep clear of it.

This wiki page (Ext4) won't help for its adoption. It seems that the potential data loss problem lies in its very design and concepts.

It is worth noting that many distros select ext4 as first choice when creating partitions.

[oz]

According to the ext4 wiki it's stable and safe to use in production environments:

Ext4 was released as a functionally complete and stable filesystem in Linux 2.6.28

It's safe to use it in production environments, but as any piece of software, it has bugs (which are more likely to be hit in the first stable versions).

I'm not sure that you can count on the wiki statements being 100% accurate for your own situation, however.

For me, I've decided to wait a while longer before implementing it, mostly because I have no complaints whatsoever with ext3. It has served me well for many years and I've not found a compelling reason to change. Still, I might move to ext4 within the next year, or so, especially if ext3 starts to appear that it's becoming obsolete.

[reed9]

FWIW, I've been using ext4 since it first went into the mainline kernel without trouble.

[gerard4143]

Thank-you for the replies.

Myself I still use ext3 because of the rumblings/rumours about ext4. I just was wondering what others thought about it.

[devils casper]

ext4 is very stable and default filesystem of Ubuntu and Fedora. I am using it for a long time.

[coopstah13]

I have also been using it since it was introduced into mainline kernel

those problems that you refer to, are with the applications, not the filesystem

these applications were designed in a way where they were expecting data to be written to disk in a certain way, which ext4 does differently from its predecessors

[Lakshmipathi]

I'm using ext4 as root file system for five months now, I haven't seen any issues - so far.
you can use ext4 as a separate partition (say /opt) see its performance and reliability.
before moving it as root file system.

[nmset]

What advantages might we expect on a root partition ? Features like extent, minimal fragmentation, delayed allocation, supra-huge files(!) are more relevant to data partitions as far as I understand.

[Lakshmipathi]

Yes,you are quite true.but if i'm not wrong,using ext3 as root file system - takes long time to perform file system check. ext4 uses checksum/skips unallocated block groups- thus ext4 would be faster to recover , in case of any errors.