From ext3 to ext4: An Interview with Theodore Ts'o

Jeff Layton talks with Theodore Ts’o about getting the best performance out of your file system, painless migration and the work still to do.

Jeffrey B. Layton

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

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While you can read the on-line documentation and articles about ext4, you can gain some important perspective by going directly to the horse’s mouth. Jeff Layton talks with Theodore Ts’o to talk about designing ext4, painless migration and the work still to do.

Jeff Layton What original design goals did you have for ext4?

Theodore Ts’o There were a number of features that we’ve wanted to add to ext3 — to improve performance, support larger number of blocks, etc. — that we couldn’t without breaking backwards compatibility, and which would take a long enough time to stabilize that we couldn’t make those changes to the existing ext3 code base. Some of those features included: extents, delayed allocation, the multiblock allocator, persistent preallocation, metadata checksums, and online defragmentation.

Along the way we added some other new features that were easy to add, and didn’t require much extra work,…

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