What is Digg?179 Comments
- podgey22, on 01/13/2009, -6/+134Don't be fooled by the graph they've nicked from Phoronix. Firstly, the test it shows is completely synthetic. It won't correlate directly with real-world performance. Secondly, the performance gains (and losses) across the rest of the tests were minimal at best.
That's not to say that Ext4 won't have some real benefits in some situations... But most users won't be able to tell the difference.
Full article: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article& ... - pHr34kY, on 01/13/2009, -4/+63SSD optimisations = win. The ext3 journal was not suited to SSD at all.
- Ouze, on 01/13/2009, -3/+61It's too bad that Reiser guy killed his wife, and then by association, the superior Reiser4 file system.
- ventralnet, on 01/13/2009, -3/+52but does it kill your wife?
- DBeta, on 01/13/2009, -1/+49From what I have heard, those with extremely large databases can see an up to 30% improvement in speed, which is damn impressive for server use.
I would be interested to see how Ext4 does beside NTFS. - or3n, on 01/13/2009, -0/+42It's a much leaner filesystem.
*cough* - ism70605, on 01/13/2009, -0/+39ext4 is capable of upgrading in place.
- 3242130193, on 01/13/2009, -0/+37True. But to be fair, ext3 came out much before th advent of SSDs. According to wikipedia, they started being used in the mid 90s (ext3 came out in 2001), but I don't think they were used on a large-enough scale to receive support.
- feyded, on 01/13/2009, -0/+33No, you can easily transition from Ext3 to Ext4. Check out this site: http://kernelnewbies.org/Ext4
- muep, on 01/13/2009, -2/+32Yes, you can upgrade an ext3 filesystem to ext4 format without losing any data. But no, you still should back up your data before doing so.
- DBeta, on 01/13/2009, -2/+28Sweet, I was hoping I wouldn't have to wait 'til 9.10 for 2.6.28.
- blapierre, on 01/13/2009, -2/+25Atleast it won't kill your wife.
- clickwir, on 01/13/2009, -0/+22SSD's aren't a filesystem.
They also perform quite differently with various filesystems. - JonForTheWin, on 01/13/2009, -4/+24Any one with the talent to write a port of it to windows doesn't use windows and wouldn't bother.
- cmost, on 01/13/2009, -9/+29EXT4 has been part of the developing kernels since 2.6.27, and arrived formally on 2.6.28. In addition, other distributions have offered EXT4 as an option, like openSUSE and Fedora 10, which are both available today. Only when God's gift to the world Ubuntu adopted EXT4 did it make headlines (which somehow implies that Ubuntu somehow invented it or championed it in some way.) Give me a break please! Ubuntu is not the only Linux distribution in town folks and other distributions are far more innovative. Haven't we all learned from our High school days? Just because something is popular doesn't make it the best.
- maz2331, on 01/13/2009, -1/+19Not on Linux it wouldn't. The reason is that due to licensing issues, it can't be made as a kernel module, and must go through the FUSE layer, which kicks performance squarely in the nuts.
- 3242130193, on 01/13/2009, -0/+16If you have kernel2.6.28 installed, here's a guide on how to use ext4, including migrating from ext3.
http://kernelnewbies.org/Ext4#head-634429ff2676cfc ...
In any case, as I've heard, ext4 will likely be used in the future as the mainstream server file system. btrfs is a more likely replacement for the desktop filesystem in the future. I for one am very thankful that I won't have to spend 5 minutes after every 10th reboot waiting for my / or /home partition to fsck.
Also note: anyone that makes a pun on fsck dies. - inactive, on 01/13/2009, -12/+27I laughed when someone asked when is it coming to Vista/Windows7
- motang, on 01/13/2009, -3/+18Time to backup my /home and starting moving over from ext3.
- ElectricKetchup, on 01/14/2009, -1/+15It'll be a lot easier for him to get some programming done with his wife out of the way.
- davidrools, on 01/13/2009, -1/+15seeing as how the HDD or SSD is the real bottleneck in PC performance, I'd gladly welcome even modest gains. I think a switch from ext3 to ext4 might be more noticeable than, perhaps, an increased CPU or memory clock by the same amount.
Also, moving 4 to 9 GB files is commonplace when mounting/unmounting/copying DVD images, which optical-drive-less netbook users might find themselves doing often (coincidentally often with Linux and an SSD) - Mejogid, on 01/13/2009, -0/+13@chewbie
The problem is that there's no decent Ext4 driver for Windows and no decent NTFS driver (performance-wise) for linux, so there's no real way to compare the two without being affected by OS performance. - GavinZac, on 01/13/2009, -0/+13Linux is not Ubuntu.
- inactive, on 01/13/2009, -4/+16I used to hate Linux due to its past really bad GUI's and lack of mainstream support, but man have a new look as it's so good now.
Been using Linux for over a year. Have a duel boot machine with Vista on the other partition. I rarely boot to Vista unless I want to check a game out, but there is so many bad games there's no reason to use it. - Jektal, on 01/13/2009, -8/+20Yeah, but how does it compare to FAT?
- califloridan, on 01/13/2009, -0/+11Until you switch to ext4 you can always change the number of mounts between fsck by using "tune2fs -c". Checking your partition after every 10th mount seems a bit excessive.
- mescon, on 01/13/2009, -1/+12While I use Ubuntu myself (and I've used slackware, debian, suse, redhat, and gentoo, but fell in love with Ubuntu), I do think you have a valid point.
- sapient2003, on 01/13/2009, -4/+15It already has. Hardware support out of the box is far more superior than Windows XP and Vista. Compiz uses far less resources than what Vista uses for the Aero interface. No need to waste resources on antivirus software. Unless it is kernel related, updates do not require a reboot. There is much more to list but I am a bit lazy at the moment.
- raydeen, on 01/13/2009, -1/+12An exabyte of porn....
Seriously though, I was going to hold off on upgrading my 8.04 for some time to come but this sounds like it might be a worthwhile install in April. 8.04 is pretty darn quick as it is, I'll be interested to see if there's any huge performance boost. - clickwir, on 01/13/2009, -0/+11It's still journaled.
- MattBD, on 01/13/2009, -0/+11That's exactly what Mark Shuttleworth has hired a load of developers to do apparently, sort out the appearance. And the Linux developers aren't responsible for the printer not working. They do their best but not all the manufacturers want to play fair, so they have to reverse-engineer them.
Also, you can't dictate what open-source developers do in the same way. Most of them are working on these in their free time, so they only volunteer to help with things they are interested in. - RadiatedAnt, on 01/13/2009, -4/+15we need a pirate distro for linux with all of these no hold bar optimizations! screw the licensing I say!
- kolobcreek, on 01/13/2009, -6/+16Looks like Rieser going to have plenty of time to work on making is FS faster.
- DS513, on 01/13/2009, -1/+11To Nirvana:
I wouldn't mess with him dude, linux people take their filesystems VERY seriously. Some may say... deadly seriously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser - chewbie, on 01/13/2009, -1/+11yeah, me too! I'm quite saddened by the fact that there's no NTFS comparison. If someone has the resources to make a test and post it here, it would be greatly appreciated.
Also I doubt that anyone is running their databases on SSDs (yet) - TiMMY8765, on 01/13/2009, -0/+10someone needs to make a graph of CPU usage during a large file copy operation vs. the other filesystems
- ninjacob, on 01/13/2009, -2/+12If it wasn't for Ubuntu, Fedora would still be the same horrible ***** it was back at FC3.
- xxNIRVANAxx, on 01/13/2009, -0/+9fsck you!
... and I'm still alive... - flarn2006, on 01/13/2009, -4/+13Insert obligatory ReiserFS joke here...
- Wyodiver, on 01/13/2009, -5/+14Well, ok, but when IS it coming to Windows 7??
- 3242130193, on 01/13/2009, -1/+9btrfs will have most of the features of zfs and be licensed under the GPL kernel.
- exscape, on 01/13/2009, -0/+8You can indeed upgrade in place, but existing files won't be upgraded to using extents, etc. If you have the space, a "reformat" is the easiest way to go.
- markscott65, on 01/13/2009, -0/+8My understanding is that you can upgrade an ext3 filesystem to ext4 in place.
- astutissimo, on 01/14/2009, -0/+8ZFS FTW!
ZFS (Zetabyte File System) is technically superior file system developed by Sun Microsystems. In the academic community, it is considered the best file system for storing porn. It is fast, lightweight, reliable and humongous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS - HonoredMule, on 01/13/2009, -0/+8I didn't bury you because you posted the full article link which is useful, but:
1) The "nicked" graph was not an aberration, and the performance gains were not minimal based on any kind of reasonable expectations. The other graphs all show a range between par and doubled performance, which is pretty awesome considering that the same volume of work was being done on the same physical hardware. How much improvement can you possibly expect in use cases that are unalterably bottlenecked by raw hardware bandwidth or latency?
2) We were already well aware that benchmarks by nature are generally synthetic. That does not automatically invalidate the measurements, especially when they represent a best genuine effort to do exactly that--measure performance. Also keep in mind that this isn't like measuring graphics performance where there's a lot of performance interdependency between memory, graphics, and general processing...this is a single isolated subsystem that is virtually never bottlenecked by anything else (unless you go out of your way to bring network performance into the picture). With all the effort that goes into simulating realistic usage patterns, I wouldn't be so quick to jump to such a FUD-like conclusion. - Nicoon, on 01/13/2009, -4/+11So what about us on Ext3...?
Will we have to delete our partitions just to upgrade to a newer file system? - podgey22, on 01/13/2009, -2/+9When you mount an image, the image doesn't move. That's the point of it.
- seraph582, on 01/13/2009, -1/+8Pretentious nonsense. There's enough money in the hands of those who could use it to do so to do so a hundred thousand times over.
- alexvalentine, on 01/13/2009, -2/+9EXT4 is available in 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), its just flagged as "dev," and is unavailable in the installer.
- damentz, on 01/13/2009, -0/+7XFS's delete performance is abnormally slow and its journal doesn't save your data any better than ext2 in power outages.
EXT4 implements some of the same functions XFS includes such as delayed allocation and multiblock preallocation. Not to mention ext4 also implements extents which helps prevent fragmentation. In all benchmarks, XFS _never_ performs faster than ext4 unless, maybe, reading one really large file.
"It takes _forever_ to create the inodes when formatting, and its structure is dated."
Thats why you format once and forget the structure when the average lifespan of the ext* filesystem is several factors longer than XFS. -
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