Frequently Asked Questions

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Getting Started

How do I get started using ext4?

Please see the Ext4 Howto page for information on getting started using ext4.

Where do I get the latest version of e2fsprogs?

The latest version of e2fsprogs can be found at Soureforge or at kernel.org.

How do I build e2fsprogs?

The INSTALL file in the top of the source tree gives more detailed information, but e2fsprogs uses a standard configure script, so the standard "./configure; make" will build the e2fsprogs binaries. Note that if you wish to build the ELF shared libraries, you need to add the "--enable-elf-shlibs" option to the configure invocation.

How do I create and mount a new ext4 filesystem?

First, make sure that you have e2fsprogs 1.41.0 or later installed on your system. This is required for ext4 support. If the new partition where you would like to create the ext4 filesystem is /dev/sdb1, then all you have to type is:

/sbin/mke2fs -t ext4 /dev/sdb1

Then to mount this new filesystem, all you need to do is:

mkdir /mnt/test
mount -t ext4 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/test

For more information, please see the Ext4 Howto document.



History of ext2, ext3, and ext4

What is the difference between ext2, ext3, and ext4?

The ext2, ext3, and ext4 file systems are a family of file systems that have a strong amount of backwards and forward compatibility. In fact, they can be considered a single filesytem format with a number of feature extensions, and ext2, ext3, and ext4 are merely the names of the implementations found in the Linux kernel. This way of looking at things is supported by the fact that they share the same userspace utilities (e2fsprogs), and that many filesystems can be mounted on different filesystems. For example, a filesystem which is created for use with ext3 can be mounted using either ext2 or ext4. However, a filesystem with ext4-specific extensions can not be mounted using ext2 or ext3, and the ext3 and ext4 file systems code in the kernel (at least of this writing) require the presence of a journal, which is generally not present in partitions formatted for use by the ext2 file system.

Why was ext2 created?

In April 1992, the ext filesystem was written by Remy Card to address two key limitations with the Minix filesystem, which had previously been the only filesystem available to Linux: filenames could be only 14 characters, and the maximum file system size supported by Minix was 64MB. The ext filesystem supported block devices up to 2GB, and file names up to 255 characters, but (like Minix) it only had a single timestamp for last modification time, last access time, and inode change time. It also used linked lists to store free blocks, which meant that files tended to get fragmented very easily. In January, 1993, the ext2 filesystem was released which further increased the maximum block size to 4TB, added POSIX timestamps, and supported variable block sizes. More importantly, it added support for extensibility so that new features could be added to the filesystem.

File System Features

What features are supported by the ext2 filesystem?

As of this writing, the ext2 filesystem supports the following features:

  • EXT2_FEATURE_COMPAT_EXT_ATTR
  • EXT2_FEATURE_INCOMPAT_FILETYPE
  • EXT2_FEATURE_INCOMPAT_META_BG
  • EXT2_FEATURE_RO_COMPAT_SPARSE_SUPER
  • EXT2_FEATURE_RO_COMPAT_LARGE_FILE
  • EXT2_FEATURE_RO_COMPAT_BTREE_DIR (note: the ext2 filesystem only btree directories in that it knows how to clear the indexed directory flag when it modifies a btree directory)

What features are supported by the ext3 file system?

As of this writing, the ext3 file system supports the following features:

  • EXT3_FEATURE_COMPAT_EXT_ATTR
  • EXT3_FEATURE_COMPAT_RESIZE_INODE
  • EXT3_FEATURE_COMPAT_DIR_INDEX
  • EXT3_FEATURE_COMPAT_HAS_JOURNAL (note: this feature *must* be set)
  • EXT3_FEATURE_INCOMPAT_FILETYPE
  • EXT3_FEATURE_INCOMPAT_RECOVER
  • EXT3_FEATURE_INCOMPAT_META_BG
  • EXT3_FEATURE_RO_COMPAT_SPARSE_SUPER
  • EXT3_FEATURE_RO_COMPAT_LARGE_FILE
  • EXT3_FEATURE_RO_COMPAT_BTREE_DIR

What features are supported by the ext4 file system?

As of this writing, the ext4 file system supports the following features:

  • EXT4_FEATURE_COMPAT_EXT_ATTR
  • EXT4_FEATURE_COMPAT_RESIZE_INODE
  • EXT4_FEATURE_COMPAT_DIR_INDEX
  • EXT4_FEATURE_COMPAT_HAS_JOURNAL (note: this feature *must* be set)
  • EXT4_FEATURE_INCOMPAT_FILETYPE
  • EXT4_FEATURE_INCOMPAT_RECOVER
  • EXT4_FEATURE_INCOMPAT_META_BG
  • EXT4_FEATURE_INCOMPAT_EXTENTS
  • EXT4_FEATURE_INCOMPAT_64BIT
  • EXT4_FEATURE_INCOMPAT_FLEX_BG
  • EXT4_FEATURE_RO_COMPAT_SPARSE_SUPER
  • EXT4_FEATURE_RO_COMPAT_LARGE_FILE
  • EXT4_FEATURE_RO_COMPAT_GDT_CSUM
  • EXT4_FEATURE_RO_COMPAT_DIR_NLINK
  • EXT4_FEATURE_RO_COMPAT_EXTRA_ISIZE
  • EXT4_FEATURE_RO_COMPAT_BTREE_DIR
  • EXT4_FEATURE_RO_COMPAT_HUGE_FILE

Understanding how it works

What are the new features in Ext4 (vs Ext2/3)?

Check here: http://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/New_ext4_features.

How do I test the features in Ext4?

How do I benchmark the performance of Ext4 as against other FS? What are the tools available?

For any filesystem and hardware platform the best benchmark are the actual applications that will be running on the system. Benchmarks are approximations of real world applications, but they may not reflect the IO load of your applications.

There exists a wide variety of tools and comparison, for more information on the different performance testing tools available: [1]

Another reference here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems.

Can I undelete files in Ext4?

No, in the same way that the ext3 journal requirements to be consistent after a crash prevent undelete of ext3 files, it isn't possible to undelete ext4 files.

Can I mount existing Ext3 as Ext4? And vice versa? Similarly from Ext2 to Ext4 and its reverse?

You can mount any ext3 filesystem as ext4 without any changes. With recent versions of ext4 (2.6.27 and later) it is required to enable the new ext4 features via tune2fs:

# tune2fs -O extents /dev/XXX
# tune2fs -O uninit_bg /dev/XXX
# e2fsck -f /dev/XXX

Some ext4 features cannot be enabled on an existing ext4 filesystem.

For ext2 the filesystem would first need to have a journal created using tune2fs before it can be mounted as ext3 or ext4. At that point the filesystem is an ext3 filesystem and the above comments apply.

# tune2fs -j /dev/XXX

What is the information provided by /proc/fs/jbd2/<partition>/history?

Executing "cat /proc/fs/jbd2/<partition>/history" gives:

R/C  tid   wait  run   lock  flush log   hndls  block inlog ctime write drop  close
R    2     0     107692 0     0     0     1      1     2    

The purpose of this history is to provide a capture of the statistical properties on the performance of the Ext4 filesystem. It can be observed that the entries are added after a file has been copied to the file system - not immediately, but delayed by a short while, due to the asynchronous mechanism of jbd2 logging(*FIXED ME*).

What is the information provided by /proc/fs/jbd2/<partition>/info?

Executing "cat /proc/fs/jbd2/<partition>/info" gives:

56 transaction, each upto 2048 blocks average:

 0ms waiting for transaction
 57671ms running transaction
 0ms transaction was being locked
 28ms flushing data (in ordered mode)
 14ms logging transaction
 2383 handles per transaction
 6 blocks per transaction
 7 logged blocks per transaction

How to online resize the Ext4 filesystem?

Online resizing of ext4 works in a similar manner as ext3, using either resize2fs or ext2resize, but there is currently a limit (around 4TB or so) to the maximum filesystem size. Implementing online resize with the META_BG feature would allow this limit to be exceeded.

What is the difference between extents mapping and traditional indirect block mapping?

To quote from the paper: http://ext2.sourceforge.net/2005-ols/2005-ext3-paper.pdf:

Currently, the ext2/ext3 filesystem, like other traditional UNIX filesystems, uses a direct, indi-
rect, double indirect, and triple indirect blocks to map file offsets to on-disk blocks. This
scheme, sometimes simply called an indirect block mapping scheme, is not efficient for large
files, especially large file deletion. In order to address this problem, many modern filesystems
(including XFS and JFS on Linux) use some form of extent maps instead of the traditional
indirect block mapping scheme.

Since most filesystems try to allocate blocks in a contiguous fashion, extent maps are a more efficient 
way to represent the mapping between logical and physical blocks for large files. An extent is a single 
descriptor for a range of contiguous blocks, instead of using, say hundreds of entries to describe 
each block individually.

What is delayed allocation? What are its advantages in Ext4?

Delayed allocation worked by deferring the allocation of new blocks in the filesystem to disk blocks until writeback time. This helps in three ways:

1. Reduced fragmentation.
2. Reduced CPU cycles spent in get_block() calls.
3. It may avoid the need for disk updates for metadata creation, which in turn reduces impact on fragmentation.

What is multiblock allocation (mballoc)?

mballoc is a mechanism to allow many blocks to be allocated to a file in a single operation, in order to dramatically reduce the amount of CPU usage searching for many free blocks in the filesystem. Also, because many file blocks are allocated at the same time, a much better decision can be made to find a chunk of free space where all of the blocks will fit.

The mballoc code is active when using the O_DIRECT flag for writes, or if the delayed allocation (delalloc) feature is being used. This allows the file to have many dirty blocks submitted for writes at the same time, unlike the existing kernel mechanism of submitting each block to the filesystem separately for allocation.

What is this bitmap allocator?

Can you say something about the history of Ext4?

Check here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4.

When was Ext4 first annouced to the LKML?

Check here: http://kerneltrap.org/node/6776

What are the key differences between ext3 and ext4?

The main new features in ext4 are below, and are described more fully in New_ext4_features:

  • extent-mapped files for more efficient storage of file metadata (EXTENTS)
  • multi-block and delayed allocation for faster/better file allocations
  • support for larger filesystems (up to 2^48 blocks, currently 2^60 bytes) (64_BIT)
  • optimized storage of filesystem metadata like bitmaps and inode table (FLEX_BG)
  • less overhead for e2fsck, on-disk checksum of group descriptors (GDT_CSUM)
  • removed 32000 subdirectory limit (DIR_NLINKS)
  • nanosecond inode timestamps (EXTRA_ISIZE)

What are the key differences between jbd and jbd2?

The code between jbd and jbd2 is nearly identical, but jbd2 adds a few new features in a compatible way:

  • support for 64-bit filesystems (64_BIT)
  • checksumming of journal transactions (CHECKSUM)
  • asynchronous transaction commit block write (ASYNC_COMMIT)
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