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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?

osgx
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3 Answers3

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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 )

Deimosfr
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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 :))) )

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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.

Benoît
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  • kmuto does not use the same kernel as the official Debian Lenny installer so officially Lenny does not support ext4. Debian Squeeze officially has full support for ext4 and is scheduled to be released in less than a week, but the RC2 installer is usable right now. – Arrowmaster Feb 01 '11 at 17:44