2005 Ottawa Linux Symposium
State of the Art: Where we are with the
Ext3 filesystem
By Mingming Cao, Theodore Y. Ts'o, Badari Pulavarty, Suparna
Bhattacharya, IBM Linux Technology Center;
Andreas Dilger, Alex Tomas, Cluster Filesystem Inc
Abstract
The ext2 and ext3 filesystems on Linux are used by a very large number
of users. This is due to its reputation of dependability,
robustness, backwards and forwards compatibility, rather than that of
being the state of the art in filesystem technology. Over the last few
years, however, there has been a significant amount of development
effort towards making ext3 an outstanding filesystem, while retaining
these crucial advantages. In this paper, we discuss those features that
have been accepted in the mainline Linux 2.6 kernel, including
directory indexing, block reservation, and online resizing. We
also discuss those features that have been implemented but are yet to
be incorporated into the mainline kernel: extent maps, delayed
allocation, and multiple block allocation. We will then examine
the performance improvements from Linux 2.4 ext3 filesystem to Linux
2.6 ext3 filesystem using industry-standard benchmarks features.
Finally, we will touch upon some potential future work which is still
under discussion by the ext2/3 developers.
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