Ext3-devel

= EXT3 Filesystem Extents/64bit Project =

Recently, many disk vendors are manufacturing disk drives using the perpendicular recording technology, which allows the density of a disk platter to go up to 30 gigabits per square inch, and that translates to 1 terabyte on a 3.5-inch hard drive.

The increase in the disk drive's capacity highlights the need for larger filesystem support. The current limits for ext2/ext3 filesystem are 2 terabytes with 1KB blocks, and 8 terabytes with 4KB blocks. In order to accommodate the growth of disk size in the next 2-5 years, the ext3 filesystem capacity needs to expand, hence the extents/64bit project.

Current Status
Ext4 filesystem has merged into 2.6.19 as a development version. The current features and future plans are documented in http://kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=blob;f=Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt

Ext3 Filesystem Extents
The ext3 extents (a.k.a. 64bit) patchset that has been proposed and submitted upstream for comments. The patchset was originally developed by the developers at Bull; however, there are many other aspects of the ext3 64bit support that weren't addressed by the original patchset. This wiki page is to explain and track the progress of this project:

Bull's opensource website is located at: http://www.bullopensource.org/ext4/

Bull's opensource webpage explains a lot of the changes in the original patchset. Most notably, the EXT3 extents with 64bit physical block patch and 64bit logical block patch.

Discussions

 * ext2-devel list discussions


 * linux-kernel discussions

Current Patchset
ext3: http://ext2.sourceforge.net/48bitext3/patches/latest/

e2fsprogs: http://ext2.sourceforge.net/48bitext3/patches/e2fsprogs/

Conference Call Minutes
May 3, 2006 ext3-devel/ext3minutes-20060503

May 10, 2006 ext3-devel/ext3minutes-20060510

May 17, 2006 ext3-devel/ext3minutes-20060517

May 31, 2006 ext3-devel/ext3minutes-20060531

June 21, 2006 ext3-devel/ext3minutes-20060621

June 28, 2006 ext3-devel/ext3minutes-20060628

Links
ext2-devel mailing list: ext2-devel@lists.sourceforge.net

ext2-devel mailing list archives

ext2 project home

e2fsprogs project home

State of the Art: Where we are with the Ext3 filesystem

Bull's Ext2/Ext3 improvement project

Wikipedia Ext3 page