How To Move Your Linux Systems To ext4 304
LinucksGirl writes "Ext4 is the latest in a long line of Linux file systems, and it's likely to be as important and popular as its predecessors. As a Linux system administrator, you should be aware of the advantages, disadvantages, and basic steps for migrating to ext4. This article explains when to adopt ext4, how to adapt traditional file system maintenance tool usage to ext4, and how to get the most out of the file system."
Preempting the prefix war (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, in this case you have to balance the confusion stemming from the Tera in IT context meaning 1024 in some cases. To be honest, people insisting on the new naming, they should have come up with a sensible sounding name and promoted that. You have to remember that language, even technical language is for the people. There are lots of ways to craft a beautiful, logical, symmetrical language that no sane person would use because it just doesn't sound convenient.
Maybe a linguist can pitch in to explain why tebibyte sounds so awful?
Re:To all ext3 users... (Score:3, Insightful)
Indulging the prefix war (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I think the whole thing is a mess, and computer professionals should be working harder to enforce a consistent scheme. Unfortunately, only a minority of computer professionals seem interested in changing the status quo confusion.
I think the real problem is that people, inherently, are loathe to change. They are more apt to come up with rationalizations and justifications for doing things "the old way" rather than put in the work to learn (and code!) a new system. Sorry if this sounds harsh, but I find the people who say the binary prefixes "sound dumb" or say that "the current (inconsistent)* system works fine" are just coming up with excuses to avoid doing the work to use a properly consistent standard/notation.
Maybe you're right, and that if the new prefixes had sounded "cooler", then adoption would have been faster... but I'm not so sure. Even if true, it doesn't absolve any of us for allowing the confusion to persist: cool or not, we (geeks especially!) should have the discipline to use proper standards.
* The current system can be roughly described as: SI prefixes are powers of 10 everywhere except in computer science, when they become powers of 2. But only when referring to memory, and some data structure sizes, but not when referring to transmission rates or disk space (unless it's a flash drive, sometimes), and other kinds of data structures.
Re:Better option: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not for the casual user (Score:4, Insightful)
Now when we have ten TB drives....
Good grief people Yea just keep a few thousand TV shows on your desktop.
Re:Why bother? (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember how reiserfs was the first filesystem to have journaling in Linux, and how some people were ready to state that there is no need to do an ext3 any more?
Re:Not for the casual user (Score:3, Insightful)
Well yeah, but Slashdot seems like a pretty good place to find people who administer multi-TB systems, no?
A terabyte isn't what it used to be (hell, 1TB SATA disks are pretty common) and ext3 sucks pretty hard even on a measly TB.
Does the sub-TB desktop crowd even care about filesystems? I mean, they all pretty much work and these days the popular ones have pretty similar performance (on a single spindle, at least).
Re:To all ext3 users... (Score:4, Insightful)
I seem to be plugging XFS in every fs thread recently, so I'll second that - I'm really surprised it's not more popular.
ext3 may have, more or less, caught up to XFS in IO speed recently, but file operations on large filesystems are still a disaster - just try deleting a 2TB tree with a couple million files in ext3, I dare you.
Re:But does it undelete... (Score:4, Insightful)
The greatest feature of modern software is "Undo." Everything I can screw up on the computer should have an Undo-- that's what the Recycle Bin (or Trash Can for Mac users) is there for, although it's a bit more awkward than pressing control-Z.
Call it stupidity if you want, but my system files (you know, the ones that file permissions actually protect from malware) are worth approximately zero, and my personal files (the ones that malware can delete no question asked) are worth hundreds of man-hours, if not thousands, and ten times that in dollar value.
Windows Shadow Copy has an exact template on how to implement it, now go implement it.
(And yes, I keep backups, as should everybody. But there's no excuse not to use spare disk space as another layer of defense.)
Re:Not for the casual user (Score:5, Insightful)
One of many reasons right here [brillig.org]
I messed around with Ext4 for a little while on my machine (Like a couple days, just toying with it and seeing how its performance compares to Ext3 and Reiser4) a while back, like maybe a little bit before it was merged as experimental in the mainstream kernel. It is fast, backwards-compatible and extremely featureful. XFS is not a bad filesystem, but it has some problems, in my eyes. Metadata-only journaling, aggressive caching that makes it a potentially dangerous choice if you don't have a UPS, very slow metadata and deletion operations.
That's great that XFS has a lot of features Ext4 is bringing to the playing field, and has had them for a long time. To pretend, however, that the developers of Ext4 simply have a NIH syndrome is just silly and disregards the fact that there is a lot that Ext4 already provides that XFS doesn't, and even more that it will soon. You might not see what the big deal is, but really, I can assure you that it won't be very long before the new ideas Ext4 employs are in widespread use.
Here's an interesting article [byteandswitch.com] that really caught my eye with this: "Storage snapshot: The financial firm has more than 14 Petabytes of active storage and plans to add "several more Pbytes" within the next 12 months."
Re:Not for the casual user (Score:3, Insightful)
There's nothing better than to sit down with the wife one evening and use the remote and flip through the DVD collection on the TV and start the movie without having to get up and figure out what to watch.
It also means we're more likely to watch something we both enjoy rather than whatever happens to be on the TV at that time.