Quote:
Originally Posted by
gaellafond
Thanks for this info Corona688 (and vbe),
Since Ext4 was part of the Kernel, I assumed it was a Unix FS. Obviously, I was wrong, it's only used with Linux. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
I don't know if it's true, but I read somewhere that only Ubuntu is currently shipped with Ext4 by default (the post might be a bit old, I don't remember). I suppose that's means that only Ubuntu can give you the creation time, as long as you don't explicitly choose Ext4 when you install Linux.
That's probably a bit old by now. Ubuntu adopted it early.
Good to know there's a better reason than peer pressure to use ext4, though, but there's more important considerations than features when picking a filesystem.
- Is it safe?
- Is it sane?
- Is it portable?
- Can it recover from errors?
- Will it grind down into a sticky mass after a few years of use?
The answers for ext3 are generally 'yes', 'yes', 'yes', 'yes', and 'no'. You can't say that for a lot of experimental or higher-performance filesystems. Some are untested, some are picky about how they're used, xfs fsck blows up on 32-bit, the kernel driver for reiserfs didn't compile right on 64-bit for a long time, ls on reiserfs3 can take 5 seconds of thrashing once you've used it 2 years, etc, etc, etc. Unless there's a high performance need you can count on ext3 not betraying you in these ways. So most maintainers were happy to wait and see if ext4 was all it was cracked up to be.