History of Linux File Systems

History of Linux File Systems

* Minix file system [????]
- Max file size: 64M
- Max file name length: 14 chars
- 16bit operations used internally

* EXT (Extended file system) [1992]
- 32bit file system to support 32bit Linux OS
- Max file size: 2G
- Max file name length: 255 chars

* EXT2 [1993]
- Some features of FFS (Fast File System) in BSD
- Weakness of the file system particularly when OS goes down abruptly with no run of shutdown

* reiserfs
- Max file size : 8T
- Journaling file system
- Fast speed by recording only meta data
- Tail packing to relive the internal fragmentation problem due to less than 4k bytes files such as in web server, news server, and mail server
- Hans Reiser, DARPA

* EXT3 [2001]
- EXT2+ journaling feature
- 3-level journaling. More stable but 10 to 15 times slower than reiserfs
- compatible with EXT2 (tune2fs)
- Max file size 16G (4k file block size), 32T (4M file block size)