[kwlug-disc] ext4

[Paul Nijjar]

On Wed, May 05, 2010 at 10:40:35AM -0400, Oksana Goertzen wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
> 
> What are the advantages of going to ext4?  Is this something I can do "in
> place"?

I guess there are some performance improvements, but I am not rushing
to convert existing filesystems to ext4. My understanding that the
biggest push for ext4 was to deal with ridiculously large disks, but I
could be wrong, and hopefully people on the LUG list will correct me. 

> I was reading http://ext4
> .wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Ext4_Howto#Converting_an_ext3_filesystem_to_ext4

> I believe I'd have to modify /etc/fstab plus it says something about
> modifying grub.  Would I need to do that on an Ubuntu system running
> 10.04 (was upgraded)?

I would check the version of GRUB you are using.  From the
bugsquishing party I seem to recall that Lucid behaves differently
when you upgrade as opposed to when you install fresh -- fresh
installs use a different version of GRUB than upgrades unless you
specify otherwise. From the page you posted above it looks like either
GRUB 1 or GRUB 2 should be able to boot ext4 partitions, but I would
keep a rescue CD around just in case. I would also hunt around to see
what kind of bug reports people are posting after they tried to
convert. 

- Paul

-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org