Re: ext4 features

Bill Davidsen
2006-07-05T12:21:42Z

Theodore Tso wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 01, 2006 at 06:33:01PM +0200, Thomas Glanzmann wrote:
>> I would like to know which new features are planed to be incorported by
>> ext4. So far I only read about supporting bigger filesystems to fit
>> recent hardware developments. So are there any other big goals for ext4?
>
> Some of the ideas which have been tossed about include:
>
> * nanosecond timestamps, and support for time beyond the 2038

The 2nd one is probably more urgent than the first. I can see a general
benefit from timestamp in ms, beyond that seems to be a specialty
requirement best provided at the application level rather than the bits
of a trillion inodes which need no such thing.

One argument against it is that with SMP with *almost* the same time in
each CPU, cache everywhere in the i/o process, and various flavors of
network filesystems, the atime/mtime become less and less useful for
determining with great precision which file is most recently modified or
accessed.

--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
Obscure bug of 2004: BASH BUFFER OVERFLOW - if bash is being run by a
normal user and is setuid root, with the "vi" line edit mode selected,
and the character set is "big5," an off-by-one errors occurs during
wildcard (glob) expansion.