Fast ext4 fsck times
This wasn’t one of the things we were explicitly engineering for when were designing the features that would go into ext4, but one of the things which we’ve found as a pleasant surprise is how much...
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Wanted: Incremental Backup Solutions that Use a Database
Dear Lazyweb, I’m looking for recommendations for Open Source backup solutions which track incremental backups using a database, and which do not use hard link directories. Someone gave me a...
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Aligning filesystems to an SSD’s erase block size
I recently purchased a new toy, an Intel X25-M SSD, and when I was setting it up initially, I decided I wanted to make sure the file system was aligned on an erase block boundary. This is a generally...
View ArticleShould Filesystems Be Optimized for SSD’s?
In one of the comments to my last blog entry, an anonymous commenter writes: You seem to be taking a different perspective to linus on the “adapting to the the disk technology” front (Linus seems to...
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Fast ext4 fsck times, revisited
Last night I managed to finish up a rather satisfying improvement to ext4’s inode and block allocators. The ext4’s original allocator was actually a bit more simple-minded than ext3’s, in that it...
View ArticleSSD’s, Journaling, and noatime/relatime
On occasion, you will see the advice that the ext3 file system is not suitable for Solid State Disks (SSD’s) due to the extra writes caused by journaling — and so Linux users using SSD’s should use...
View ArticleDelayed allocation and the zero-length file problem
A recent Ubuntu bug has gotten slashdotted, and has started raising a lot of questions about the safety of using ext4. I’ve actually been meaning to blog about this for a week or so, but between a bout...
View ArticleDon’t fear the fsync!
After reading the comments on my earlier post, Delayed allocation and the zero-length file problem as well as some of the comments on the Slashdot story as well as the Ubuntu bug, it’s become very...
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I have the money shot for my LCA presentation
Thanks to Eric Whitney’s benchmarking results, I have my money shot for my upcoming 2011 LCA talk in Brisbane, which will be about how to improve scalability in the Linux kernel, using the case study...
View ArticleAndroid will be using ext4 starting with Gingerbread
I received a trackback from Tim Bray’s Saving Data Safely post on the Android Developer’s blog to my Don’t fear the fsync! blog entry, so I guess the cat’s out of the bag. Starting with Gingerbread,...
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