[CentOS] Is ext4 safe for a production server?

Wed Dec 9 17:23:24 UTC 2009
Miguel Di Ciurcio Filho <miguel at ic.unicamp.br>

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=03010a3350301baac2154fa66de925ae2981b7e3
[2] rpm -q --changelog kernel|grep ext4