On 12/9/2009 12:23 PM, Miguel Di Ciurcio Filho wrote:
Miguel Medalha wrote:
I am about to install a new server running CentOS 5.4. The server will contain pretty critical data that we can't afford to corrupt.
Just for the record, Theodore Ts'o marked ext4 as stable and ready for general usage more than one year ago [1]. On 25 December 2008 kernel 2.6.28 was released with ext4 considered ready for production. So, ext4 is not _that_ new anymore. One year latter that Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10 began using ext4 as default.
I believe for 5.5 or even on 5.6, ext4 will not be a tech preview anymore. Considering that RH has extended the support so much, and how ext3 is so limited with the current and future disk's capacities (fsck on a 1TB volume is not funny). The current ext4 module is close to the one on 2.6.29 plus lots of fixes [2]
[1] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=... [2] rpm -q --changelog kernel|grep ext4
My leaning is that 5.4 would be a bit too soon for production data, unless you have a very specific need and very good backups. But it's darned close to ready.
Waiting until 5.5 or 5.6 (or 6.0) or at least waiting until next spring sounds like a reasonable middle ground. That gives the Ubuntu and FC hordes time to beat on it in less controlled settings.