[CentOS] ext4?

Mon Aug 9 13:42:10 UTC 2010
James Hogarth <james.hogarth at gmail.com>

>
> "Bloody cushty mate" ;)
>

Nice :) Glad to hear you got it worked out...

RHEL kernels do have ext4 enabled by default but in 5.4 (I think....)
it was labelled ext4dev to indicate that there was the *possibility*
of changes to it as a development system that could potentially result
in manual steps required due to low level changes - for example see
how the btrfs stuff changed at one point in the main kernel
development line....

In 5.5 (I think... would need to double check the relevant release
notes to be sure... I may be one point release in front) the label was
changed from ext4dev to ext4 to indicate that no low level changes
would occur any more (ie the structure of the filesystem was
finalized) however it was still considered a technology preview....
There was something (a tunefs change needed if I recall correctly off
the top of my head) to allow old ext4dev systems to be relabelled as
ext4 systems to be recognised and mountable....

That's the blah of it ;) Of course RHEL6 will have ext4 by default and
not just supported (IIRC) and I imagine that the next point release in
the 5 series will take it from technology preview to a formally
supported filesystem...

Is disk I/O an issue for you? I'll be testing RHEL6 beta 2 with our
applications in the next few weeks and I've been wondering whether it
would be wise to tune the mount options to improve disk I/O as it is
pretty intensive for us at times (lots of read and writing in
functional testing)... I recall when ext4 first came with Ubuntu
Karmic I had to tune the mount options to have our stuff perform
sensibly on the development desktops here...

James