Published at LXer:

With the release of the 2.6.19-rc1-mm1 kernel, the ext4 filesystem was merged into Andrew Morton's -mm tree for further testing. In the announcement Andrew notes that the new filesystem is compatible with ext3 until you add a file that has extents. He also notes, "when comparing performance with other filesystems, remember that ext3/4 by default offers higher data integrity guarantees than most. So when comparing with a metadata-only journalling filesystem, use `mount -o data=writeback'.(Although this doesn't seem to make much difference with ext3)" The goal is to stabilize the new filesystem within the next six to nine months, and ultimately to replace the ext3 filesystem.

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