21 comment

1. I just did this in Intrepid the other day, but took a different approach. You may want to advise your readers that Grub won’t boot to an ext4 partition. Since I have a separate /boot, I just converted my / to ext4 with no problems.

   This is really simple actually, just requires a couple reboots:
   sudo nano /etc/fstab
   -change the fs type from ext3 to ext4dev for you root partition, the default options for ext4dev have extents enabled, so you cannot switch back to ext3
   sudo touch /forcefsck
   -this runs a fsck on reboot
   sudo reboot
   -let it run through the fsck, and once the system is up reboot again, it will need one more reboot and fsck to correct the journal
   mount
   -should list your partition as using ext4dev as the fs type

2. @Daniel,

   The post has been updated.

   Appreciate your comment.

3. From your post it says a benefit of ext4 is Defragmentation support. What is happening here … I thought the benefit of linux file systems was that the files did not fragment ………. Are we about to see a flood of Windows style disk defragmenters?

4. @ Peter:
   I agree. File system fragmentation???
   I’ve always enjoyed my linux clients and servers because I never had to schedule routine defragmentations like I have to do with Windows’ FAT and NTFS partitions…
   I will have to look into this some and experement.
   Thanks for the great post Vivek!

5. Thanks I am using Ext4 with Jaunty Alpha 3 as my main system for / and /home partitions (using the Alternated CD) and it is so fast I don’t even notice that I enabled encryption for the whole home directory. Now I can convert my data partitions too!

   BTW I think the defrag feature refers to on-the-fly defragging while in use.

6. @ Peter / Alec

   BobCFC is correct about defragmentation. This new feature is called online fragmentation. Right now it is *NOT* available in v2.6.28, but will be probably available in the next release. Quoting from ext4 wiki:

   While delayed allocation, extents and multiblock allocation help to reduce the fragmentation, with usage filesystems can still fragment. For example: You write three files in a directory and continually on the disk. Some day you need to update the file of the middle, but the updated file has grown a bit, so there’s not enough room for it. You have no option but fragment the excess of data to another place of the disk, which will cause a seek, or allocate the updated file continually in another place, far from the other two files, resulting in seeks if an application needs to read all the files on a directory (say, a file manager doing thumbnails on a directory full of images). Besides, the filesystem can only care about certain types of fragmentation, it can’t know, for example, that it must keep all the boot-related files contiguous, because it doesn’t know which files are boot-related. To solve this issue, Ext4 will support online fragmentation, and there’s a e4defrag tool which can defragment individual files or the whole filesystem.

7. Great knowledge base that i ever found…….. 🙂

8. Ext4 users are reporting few problems :
   http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=6796365&postcount=251
   and thread:
   http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=965879
   —
   Then ,we need e2fsprogs 1.41 or higher for ext4.kernel 2.6.28 for stable(eh?) ext4 unlike ext4dev.then converting a Linux root system from ext3 to ext4.Isn’t it risky with the current status of kernel support?

9. First time i heard about ext4 file system. thanks for the information

10. In case of Debian lenny: the fs-type must be “ext4dev” in fstab, since debian does not yet consider ext4 stable enough to call it “ext4”, that will probably make it in sid.

11. Oh yeah, when you reboot it seems to break a couple of desktop applets such as Quicklaunch (at least in my VM). And I did not notice an increase in boot times at all like so many have reported. Maybe it only applies to a fresh format ext4 w/ Ubuntu disc.

12. If you “convert” from ext3 to ext4 only new created files are “true” ext4, the existing files are still ext3-like, so existing files are as slow as usual, and deleting those files is as slow as usual too.
    Use fresh formatted ext4 or copy the files around (not move inside one partition!) will help.

13. sir
    i want to know depth of linux file system can you provide me detail matter..
    i am very much thankfull to you.
    your faithfully
    brijesh kumar
    allahabad (india)

14. Hi,
    In Redhat and Fedora there is /etc/grub.conf or /boot/grub/grub.conf not /boot/grub.conf (in How do I boot from ext4 (/boot)?)

15. I don’t understand why people are using ext3 or ext4 for /boot. Isn’t ext2 good enough ? Why the journaling would be useful for this partition ?

16. Any more good web sites on ext 4 and or the new grub 2 ?

17. “How do I boot from ext4 (/boot)?”

    The info in this section is incorrect please do not use. See the grub wiki for correct details on how to modify a grub2 boot files.

18. Another reference advised to run fsck.ext4 with -D after tune2fs:

    fsck.ext4 -yfD /dev/sdc1

    Linas also advised enabling extents on all files / directories which will save the trouble of copying things around in order to achieve the full ext4 benefit. I used this after mounting the partition:

    find . -xdev -type f -print0 |
    while read -d $” FILE; do chattr +e “${FILE}”; done
    find . -xdev -type d -print0 |
    while read -d $” DIR; do chattr +e “${DIR}”; done

    Cheers!

19. This is an incomplete tutorial if you read.

    Need to specify -D with the ext4 fsck for a start. See for info.

20. Thanks,
    was very helpful, old article, but well written.
    probably best descriptive article on this topic.
    My 1.3 TB filesystem is converted successfully.

21. Hi,

    I want to convert my xfs file system to ext4 on CentOS 7 box. Please help me in this.

    Regards,

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