Crash Testing ext4 on Ubuntu

One of the more controversial aspects of the Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope release is the use of the ext4 filesystem. Users have apparently lost important data already while testing Ubuntu on their desktop. This article provides some basic information about ext4 and then provides some test results on a Ubuntu 9.04 server.

Ubuntu has backported the ext4 filesystem to the 2.6.28 kernel in Jaunty Jackalope 9.04.

# uname -r
2.6.28-11-server

What is ext4?
The ext4 file system is a journaling file system which is a branch of ext3. Ext3 has been so valuable in terms of stability and usability to Linux that the developers decided to fork ext3 to ext4 instead of incorporating the features of ext into ext3. Those features include 64-bit storage limits and performance boosts. The 2.6.28 Kernel included ext4 as stable code.

Read more at BeginLinux.com