Are there any real advantages of ext4 over ext2 ?
Valeri Galtsev
galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu
Thu Jul 9 01:11:08 UTC 2020
On 7/8/20 2:59 PM, Polytropon wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Jul 2020 23:40:12 +0530, Manish Jain wrote:
>> I have a dual boot computer with FreeBSD and Linux.
>>
>> My Linux partitions are ext4 simply because ext4 is now the default
>> under Linux. However, ext4 is not supported directly by FreeBSD. As a
>> result, writing to those filesystems from FreeBSD is painfully slow (via
>> fuse).
>>
>> It is notable that ext2fs is directly supported by FreeBSD.
>
> You are talking about different levels of support - by the
> kernel or by a kernel module, for read-only or read/write.
>
>
>
>> ext4 supports huge files (in terra bytes) [...]
>
> Prefix: tera. Tera, 10^12 != terra, earth. ;-)
>
No, no, that was really fun to read! I for one make fun a bit
differently, when it is realy large munber of TBs I say:
Terror-bytes ;-)
Valeri
>
>
>> [...] and filesystems (in thousands
>> of peta bytes). But very few people have such files/filesystems. At
>> least, don't - my use case is max 64 GB file, max 500 GB filesystem.
>
> If you have such a case, ext4 is possibly an option, but there
> are other filesystems that might be better suited to hold
> extremely large files withing even larger filesystems.
>
>
>
>> So I wonder are there any real advantages of ext4 over ext2 ?
>
> In my experience, ext4 is more stable than ext2, and therefore
> can cope with potential filesystem problems better. Furthermore,
> it's more recent, so it's not entirely impossible that ext2
> support will be removed sometimes in the future.
>
> However, for the case of a "data exchange partition to be used
> for FreeBSD and Linux in read/write mode", ext2 can definitely
> be called a lowest common denominator. That doesn't mean it is
> superior to more recent native filesystems, but for _that_ case,
> it surely is a valid choice.
>
>
>
--
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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