Sunday, August 14, 2011

Linux Ext2,Ext3,Ext4 File systems

A LINUX file system is a collection of files and directories stored. Each file system is stored in a separate whole disk partition.here we see file system types

The ext2 (second extended file system) is a file system for the Linux kernel. It was initially designed by Remy Card as a replacement for the extended file system (ext).It was introduced with the 1.0 kernel in 1993.Ext2 is flexible,can handle file system up to 4 TB,and supports long file names up to 1012 characters,it has sparse super blocks feature which increase file system performance.In case any user processes fill up a file system,ext2 normally reserves about 5% of disk blocks for exclusive use by root so that root can easily recover from that situation.

The ext3 (third extended file system) is a journal ed file system that is commonly used by the Linux kernel. It is the default file system for many popular Linux distributions,Stephen Tweedie developed ext3.It provides all the features of ext2,and also features journaling and backward compatibility with ext2.The backward compatibility enables you to still run kernels that are only ext2-aware with ext3 partitions.we can also use all of the ext2 file system tuning,repair and recovery tools with ext3 also you can upgrade an ext2 file system to an ext3 file system without losing any of your data.
Ext3’s journaling feature speeds up the amount of time ,in ext2 when a file system is uncleanly mounted ,the whole file system must be checked.This takes a long time on large file systems.On an ext3 system ,the system keeps a record of uncommitted file transactions and applies only those transactions when the system is brought back up.So a complete system check is not required and the system will come back up much faster.

The ext4 (fourth extended file system) is a journaling file system for Linux,Ext4 is part of the Linux 2.6.28 kernel,Ext4 is the evolution of the most used Linux file system, Ext3. In many ways, Ext4 is a deeper improvement over Ext3 than Ext3 was over Ext2. Ext3 was mostly about adding journaling to Ext2, but Ext4 modifies important data structures of the file system such as the ones destined to store the file data. The result is a filesystem with an improved design, better performance, reliability and features.developed by Mingming Cao,Andreas Dilger,Alex Zhuravlev,Dave Kleikamp,Theodore Ts'o, Eric Sandeen,Sam Naghshineh and others.