ext4 in debian 5 (2.6.26)

Question

Is ext4 ready for production usage in debian 5 (with linux kernel version 2.6.26) ? Will it be stable, oops-free and bug-free?

Answer 1

Unfortunatly, not yet :-(. That's why you don't find it when you try to install a Debian with the installer.

You need to upgrade to Squeeze (testing version) if you want it as you will got a newer kernel (improving stability). 2.6.26 kernel is quiet old now and wasn't stable enough to have it in production.

You may look at Lenny and a Half, this avoid you to use a testing version, and you'll have newer kernel and ext4 binaries to have it stable.

http://wiki.debian.org/LennyAndAHalf

Another solution, is the backuports, but I'm not sure if a newer kernel is available.

And finally if you want to have ext4 in production, you should have a kernel version equal or upper than 2.6.28 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4 )

Answer 2

You will not find ext4 support with the debian lenny standard 2.6.26 kernel, but you can grab 2.6.30 from the backports project http://www.backports.org/.

IMHO, using XFS is a better choice, EXT4 is still not too stable (even if Google is migrating to it :))) )

Answer 3

Yep it's ready, but not easily available in the installer. I've installed many computers using a custom installer kmuto with the following layout:

/boot ext3 100MB
/     ext4

And it works great. The /boot in ext3 is(was) mandatory for the old grub.

To use grub2 and get rid of a separate /boot, you have(had) to add rootfstype=ext4 to the kernel bootparams.

It works just fine.