EXT 4 File System

Content

 History
 Introduction
 Main Features
 Other Features
 Other Info
History

Ext4 has involved from Minix File System of Linux

Ext stands for extended file system
Ext (1992), Ext2 (1993) and Ext3(2001) are predecessors
Ext was introduced to overcome size limitations of the Minix filesystem
Ext2 was more forward-looking, in that a lot of space is left between the metadata
structures for future use
Ext3 introduced journal, which records in advance the changes that will be performed to
the filesystem and shorter fsck run times.
Ext4 was introduced in 2006, with more capacity and better performance
In 2008 Ext4 became the Linux Default file system
Ext4 can be mounted as Ext3 if required
Ext 4 Introduction

 Is a Journaled file system used by the Linux Kernel

 Primarily improves performance, reliability, and capacity
 Ext4 allocates storage space in units of blocks
 Blocks are further grouped into larger groups called Block Groups
 General block size = 4KB, but can be between 1KB to 64KB
 To improve reliability, metadata and journal checksums were added
 The filesystem timestamps were improved with the addition of intervals down to
nanoseconds.
Inode

 An inode is a 256-byte block on the disk and stores data about the files.
 This includes:
 the file's size
 user IDs of the file's user and group owners
 the file access permissions
 three timestamps specifying the time and date that the file was last accessed, last
modified, and the data in the inode was last modified.
 The inode also contains data that points to the location of the file's data on the hard
drive.