As we have seen in this paper, there has been a tremendous amount of work that has gone into the ext2/3 filesystem, and this work is continuing. What was once essentially a simplified BSD FFS descendant has turned into an enterprise-ready filesystem that can keep up with the latest in storage technologies.
What has been the key to the ext2/3 filesystem's success? One reason is the forethought of the initial ext2 developers to add compatibility feature flags. These flags have made ext2 easily extensible in a variety of ways, without sacrificing compatibility in many cases.
Another reason can be found by looking at the company affiliations of various current and past ext2 developers: Cluster File Systems, Digeo, IBM, OSDL, Red Hat, SuSE, VMWare, and others. Different companies have different priorities, and have supported the growth of ext2/3 capabilities in different ways. Thus, this diverse and varied set of developers has allowed the ext2/3 filesystem to flourish.
The authors have no doubt that the ext2/3 filesystem will continue to mature and come to be suitable for a greater and greater number of workloads. As the old Frank Sinatra song stated, ``The best is yet to come.''