Mingming Cao, Theodore Y. Ts'o, Badari Pulavarty, Suparna Bhattacharya
IBM Linux Technology Center
{cmm, theotso, pbadari}@us.ibm.com, suparna@in.ibm.com
The ext2 and ext3 filesystems on Linux
1#1 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.
