Linux 2.6.28 is just out and it includes support for ext4 which is now stable. Coincidentally, a new 500G drive is meandering its way to my home as we speak. It will be used mostly for MythTV (with 2 HD tuners and much transcoding, though I'm not I/O bound on the transcoding). I'm an XFS fan, especially for multimedia like MythTV or audio/video editing. But, ext4 looks to have many of the advantages of XFS. I haven't done a point-by-point comparison since I'm not an expert on filesystems, but the major points that they both have are being extent-based, delayed allocation, fragmentation resistance and online defragmentation, and some others probably.
XFS' big disadvantage from where I sit is that you can't shrink it, only grow it. I have wished to shrink an XFS at least once before, so this isn't a theoretical problem. Its big advantage is that it's stable and proven. ext4's big disadvantage is its newness. Stable or not it's much newer than XFS and a .0 release at the moment. It's advantages include kernel developer mindshare, eventualy mainstreamness, and ???. That's where you come in. Does ext4 have any significant feature that XFS doesn't, that mere mortals running MythTV might notice? Does ext4 support shrinkage? Any thoughts? -- Hans Fugal ; http://hans.fugal.net There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. -- Johann Sebastian Bach /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
