Prominent open source personalities presented a host of information about current and future developments in Linux at the Linux-Kongress 2009 conference. This time, filesystems were discussed in several presentations. Among the topics were the advantages of Ext4 and Btrfs.

So, after being completely betrayed[1] by Ext4 not once, but twice, I decided to evaluate my FS options for /home.

This article is meant to serve as a guide for migrating a live system from ext3 to an ext4 filesystem, including migration of files to use extents, a major feature in ext4.

The past few Linux kernel releases have brought a number of new file-systems to the Linux world. Being the benchmarking junkies that we are, we have set out to compare the file-system performance of EXT4, Btrfs, and NILFS2 under Ubuntu using the Linux 2.6.30 kernel.

If you run your data center on Linux you have likely heard of BTRfs, the next generation file system that was recently merged into the kernel. I recently sat down with Oracle developer Chris Mason to discuss the file system, how he corrupted Linus’ root filesystem with his first patch (and lived to tell about it).

Did you ever hear sentences like “Linux/Unix filesystems are superior, to stuff like NTFS, let alone FAT32 - you don’t even need a defragmentation tool.”?

Bruce Perens provides an insightful comment about the settlement between Microsoft and TomTom.

This is somewhat of a simple observation on my part, but one of the things I've noticed of late is how the cry for Ext4 is growing, and fast. Sure, recent benchmarks make it look like the ultimate solution. But I don't recommend moving to the Ext4 file system just yet.