With the upgrade to 64bit Slackware 13 I thought it might be time to upgrade the /home partition to ext4 as well. It's been the same for a couple of years and could probably use a "defrag" so rather than just upgrade the journal++ from ext3 to ext4, I wish to do a complete backup, reformat and restore.

From way back I remember various ext4-related questions to a change in default parameters to ext4 both at creation time and at mount time to prevent dataloss in case of a system crash. I can however not remember which way the default changed, and Google gives too many contradictary hits to make sense.

So here goes:

Are there any special parameters that I should add to mke2fs to make the new /home ext4 partition more robust?

Are there any matching parameters to be added to fstab?

Thanks in advance!

-y1

You should take a look at my little help guide I created.

It should explain using LVM to creating a filesystem. Its very simple to do.

Hope this helps you.

Hi,

Can't see any references to ext4 fs tuning in there anywhere, so i cannot see how that helps.

lvm is not needed for this setup. just looking for recommendations for fs blocksize and things like data written ordered,writeback or journaled etc...

Maybe this Ext4_Howto could be helpful

Here is another good tutorial on ext4:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ext4
It explains that you can mount your existing ext3 partition as ext4 for slightly improved performance. It also describes how to convert an ext3 partition to ext4.

I have read that if you are concerned about possible data corruption in the event of a system crash due to the delayed allocation feature of ext4, you can add nodelalloc to the partition's boot options in fstab. Although I have read that this is not really necessary with the most recent linux kernels that have better implementations of ext4.

In addition to the point that Tom made, remember that (as part of efforts to fix some I/O wait time regressions) the recent kernels (>= 2.6.30 I think) have a different default ext3 behaviour as well. You can see an earlier post of mine about this:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ml#post3569439

AFAIK 2.6.31 will include another new mount option which will improve the performance without raising data security concerns.