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The ext4 journaling file system or fourth extended filesystem is a journaling file system for Linux, developed as the successor to ext3. It is the default file system for most Linux distributions.

Contents

History

ext4 was born as a series of backward-compatible extensions to ext3, many of them originally developed by Cluster File Systems for the Lustre file system between 2003 and 2006, meant to extend storage limits and add other performance improvements.[4] However, other Linux kernel developers opposed accepting extensions to ext3 for stability reasons,[5] and proposed to fork the source code of ext3, rename it as ext4, and perform all the development there, without affecting the current ext3 users. This proposal was accepted, and on 28 June 2006, Theodore Ts'o, the ext3 maintainer, announced the new plan of development for ext4.[6]

A preliminary development version of ext4 was included in version 2.6.19[7] of the Linux kernel. On 11 October 2008, the patches that mark ext4 as stable code were merged in the Linux 2.6.28 source code repositories,[8] denoting the end of the development phase and recommending ext4 adoption. Kernel 2.6.28, containing the ext4 filesystem, was finally released on 25 December 2008.[9] On 15 January 2010, Google announced that it would upgrade its storage infrastructure from ext2 to ext4.[10] On 14 December 2010, Google also announced it would use ext4, instead of YAFFS, on Android 2.3.[11]

Features

Large file system The ext4 filesystem can support volumes with sizes up to 1

exbibyte (EiB) and single files with sizes up to 16

tebibytes (TiB) with the standard 4

KiB

block size.

[12] The maximum file, directory, and filesystem size limits grow at least proportionately with the filesystem block size up to the maximum 64 KiB block size available on

ARM and

PowerPC/

Power ISA CPUs. Extents

Extents replace the traditional

block mapping scheme used by ext2 and ext3. An extent is a range of contiguous physical blocks, improving large file performance and reducing fragmentation. A single extent in ext4 can map up to 128

MiB of contiguous space with a 4 KiB block size.

[4] There can be four extents stored directly in the

inode. When there are more than four extents to a file, the rest of the extents are indexed in a

tree.

[13] Backward compatibility ext4 is

backward-compatible with

ext3 and

ext2, making it possible to

mount ext3 and ext2 as ext4. This will slightly improve performance, because certain new features of the ext4 implementation can also be used with ext3 and ext2, such as the new block allocation algorithm, without affecting the on-disk format. ext3 is partially

forward-compatible with ext4. Practically, ext4 will not mount as an ext3 filesystem out of the box, unless certain new features are disabled when creating it, such as

^extent,

^flex_bg,

^huge_file,

^uninit_bg,

^dir_nlink, and

^extra_isize.

[14] Persistent pre-allocation ext4 can pre-allocate on-disk space for a file. To do this on most file systems, zeroes would be written to the file when created. In ext4 (and some other files systems such as

XFS)

fallocate(), a new system call in the Linux kernel, can be used. The allocated space would be guaranteed and likely contiguous. This situation has applications for media streaming and databases. Delayed allocation ext4 uses a performance technique called

allocate-on-flush, also known as

delayed allocation. That is, ext4 delays block allocation until data are flushed to disk. (In contrast, some file systems allocate blocks immediately, even when the data go into a write cache.) Delayed allocation improves performance and reduces

fragmentation by effectively allocating larger amounts of data at a time. Unlimited number of subdirectories Ext4 does not limit the number of subdirectories in a single directory, except by the inherent size limit of the directory itself. (In ext3 a directory can have at most 32,000 subdirectories.)

[15] To allow for larger directories and continued performance, ext4 in Linux 2.6.23 and later turns on

HTree

indices (a specialized version of a

B-tree) by default, which allows directories up to approximately 10-12 million entries to be stored in the 2-level HTree index and 2GB directory size limit for 4 KiB block size, depending on the filename length. In Linux 4.12 and later the

largedir feature enabled a 3-level HTree and directory sizes over 2GB, allowing approximately 6 billion entries in a single directory. Journal checksumming ext4 uses

checksums in the journal to improve reliability, since the journal is one of the most used files of the disk. This feature has a side benefit: it can safely avoid a disk I/O wait during journaling, improving performance slightly. Journal checksumming was inspired by a research paper from the

University of Wisconsin, titled

IRON File Systems

[16] (specifically, section 6, called "transaction checksums"), with modifications within the implementation of compound transactions performed by the IRON file system (originally proposed by Sam Naghshineh in the RedHat summit). Metadata checksumming Since Linux kernel 3.16. Faster file system checking In ext4 unallocated block groups and sections of the inode table are marked as such. This enables

e2fsck to skip them entirely and greatly reduces the time it takes to check the file system. Linux 2.6.24 implements this feature.

Multiblock allocator When ext3 appends to a file, it calls the block allocator, once for each block. Consequently, if there are multiple concurrent writers, files can easily become

fragmented on disk. However, ext4 uses delayed allocation which allows it to buffer data and allocate groups of blocks. Consequently, the multiblock allocator can make better choices about allocating files

contiguously on disk. The multiblock allocator can also be used when files are opened in O_DIRECT mode. This feature does not affect the disk format. Improved timestamps As computers become faster in general and as Linux becomes used more for

mission-critical applications, the granularity of second-based timestamps becomes insufficient. To solve this, ext4 provides

timestamps measured in

nanoseconds. In addition, 2 bits of the expanded timestamp field are added to the most significant bits of the seconds field of the timestamps to defer the

year 2038 problem for an additional 408 years. ext4 also adds support for time-of-creation timestamps. But, as

Theodore Ts'o points out, while it is easy to add an extra creation-date field in the

inode (thus technically enabling support for these timestamps in ext4), it is more difficult to modify or add the necessary

system calls, like

stat() (which would probably require a new version) and the various

libraries that depend on them (like

glibc). These changes will require coordination of many projects. Therefore, the creation date stored by ext4 is currently only available to user programs on Linux via the

statx() API.

[18] Transparent encryption Support for transparent encryption was added in Linux kernel 4.1 on June 2015.

[19]

Limitations

In 2008, the principal developer of the ext3 and ext4 file systems, Theodore Ts'o, stated that although ext4 has improved features, it is not a major advance, it uses old technology, and is a stop-gap. Ts'o believes that Btrfs is the better direction because "it offers improvements in scalability, reliability, and ease of management."[20] Btrfs also has "a number of the same design ideas that reiser3/4 had".[21] However, ext4 has continued to gain new features such as file encryption and metadata checksums.

The ext4 file system does not honor the "secure deletion" file attribute, which is supposed to cause overwriting of files upon deletion. A patch to implement secure deletion was proposed in 2011, but did not solve the problem of sensitive data ending up in the file system journal.[22]

Delayed allocation and potential data loss

Because delayed allocation changes the behavior that programmers have been relying on with ext3, the feature poses some additional risk of data loss in cases where the system crashes or loses power before all of the data has been written to disk. Due to this, ext4 in kernel versions 2.6.30 and later automatically handles these cases as ext3 does.

The typical scenario in which this might occur is a program replacing the contents of a file without forcing a write to the disk with fsync. There are two common ways of replacing the contents of a file on Unix systems:[23]

In this case, an existing file is truncated at the time of open (due to

O_TRUNC flag), then new data is written out. Since the write can take some time, there is an opportunity of losing contents even with ext3, but usually very small. However, because ext4 can delay writing file data for a long time, this opportunity is much greater. There are several problems that can arise:

1. If the write does not succeed (which may be due to error conditions in the writing program, or due to external conditions such as a full disk), then both the original version and the new version of the file will be lost, and the file may be corrupted because only a part of it has been written.
2. If other processes access the file while it is being written, they see a corrupted version.
3. If other processes have the file open and do not expect its contents to change, those processes may crash. One notable example is a shared library file which is mapped into running programs.

Because of these issues, often the following idiom is preferred over the one above: A new temporary file ("file.new") is created, which initially contains the new contents. Then the new file is renamed over the old one. Replacing files by the

rename() call is guaranteed to be atomic by

POSIX standards – i.e. either the old file remains, or it's overwritten with the new one. Because the ext3 default "ordered" journaling mode guarantees file data is written out on disk before metadata, this technique guarantees that either the old or the new file contents will persist on disk. ext4's delayed allocation breaks this expectation, because the file write can be delayed for a long time, and the rename is usually carried out before new file

contents reach the disk.

Using fsync() more often to reduce the risk for ext4 could lead to performance penalties on ext3 filesystems mounted with the data=ordered flag (the default on most Linux distributions). Given that both file systems will be in use for some time, this complicates matters for end-user application developers. In response, ext4 in Linux kernels 2.6.30 and newer detect the occurrence of these common cases and force the files to be allocated immediately. For a small cost in performance, this provides semantics similar to ext3 ordered mode and increases the chance that either version of the file will survive the crash. This new behavior is enabled by default, but can be disabled with the "noauto_da_alloc" mount option.[23]

The new patches have become part of the mainline kernel 2.6.30, but various distributions chose to backport them to 2.6.28 or 2.6.29.[24]

These patches don't completely prevent potential data loss or help at all with new files. The only way to be safe is to write and use software that does fsync() when it needs to. Performance problems can be minimized by limiting crucial disk writes that need fsync() to occur less frequently.[25]

Implementation

Linux kernel Virtual File System is a subsystem or layer inside of the Linux kernel. It is the result of the very serious attempt to integrate multiple file systems into an orderly single structure. The key idea, which dates back to the pioneering work done by Sun Microsystems employees in 1986,[26] is to abstract out that part of the file system that is common to all file systems and put that code in a separate layer that calls the underlying concrete file systems to actually manage the data.

All system calls related to files (or pseudo files) are directed to the Linux kernel Virtual File System for initial processing. These calls, coming from user processes, are the standard POSIX calls, such as open, read, write, lseek, etc.

Compatibility with Windows and Macintosh

ext4 does not yet have as much support as ext2 and ext3 on non-Linux operating systems. ext2 and ext3 have stable drivers such as Ext2IFS, which are not yet available for ext4. It is possible to create compatible ext4 filesystems by disabling the extents feature, and sometimes specifying an inode size.[27] Another option for using ext4 in Windows is to use Ext2Fsd,[28] an open-source driver that supports writing in ext4 partitions with limited journaling. Viewing and copying files from ext4 to Windows, even with extents enabled, is also possible with the Ext2Read software.[29] More recently Paragon released its commercial product ExtFS for Windows which allows read/write capabilities for ext2/3/4.

macOS has full ext2/3/4 read–write capability through the Paragon ExtFS[30] software, which is a commercial product. Free software such as ext4fuse has only read-only support with limited functionality.

See also

References

‏Source en.wikipedia.org