Ask Fedora Beat

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 26.01.2009 08:46, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> 
> Please add this to the Ask Fedora Beat this week. I have trouble editing 
> the wiki pages. Chris Tyler, your answer is still pending
> 
> ---
> 
> A question on Ext4, that has already been made the default in the 
> development tree headed for Fedora 11 was answered by Eric Sandeen, Red 
> Hat Ext4 and XFS filesytems developer.
> 
> Contributing Writer: Eric Sandeen
> 
> Francesco Frassinelli <fraph24 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I've read that in F11 ext4 will be the default filesystem. What about
> ext4 on solid state disk? Many websites and bloggerssay that it's
> better to use ext2 because of the journaling, but in some kind of
> operation (like applying upgrades) it's sooo slow. Could we'll use
> ext4 on our ssd without compromising theirs life?
> TBH I haven't tested ext4 on ssd yet, though we do have some in the lab,
> I just haven't done it.
> 
> Eric Sandeen replied:
> 
> By default ext4 still journals pretty much the same as ext3 does, so if
> you want to minimize writes to your flash, it should not be 
> significantly better than ext3 in that respect.
> 
> However, there is a patch to ext4 (merged soon if not already) to allow
> it to run in a no-journal mode, so that may be a good option.

FYI, it was merged for 2.6.29:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=0390131ba84fd3f726f9e24fc4553828125700bb

CU
knurd