Android will be using ext4 starting with Gingerbread

"I received a trackback from Tim Bray's Saving Data Safely post on the Android Developer's blog to my Don't fear the fsync! blog entry, so I guess the cat's out of the bag. Starting with Gingerbread, newer Android phones (starting with the Nexus S) will be using the ext4 file system. Very cool! So just as IBM used to promote Linux by saying that it was scalable enough to run on everything between watches and mainframes, I can now talk about ext4 as running in production on cell phones to Google data centers.

"How much am I worried about Tim Bray's caution to Android programmers that they use fsync() correctly? Not a lot. Sure, they should make sure they use fsync(), or if they want to be clever, sync_file_range(), to make sure files are appropriately written to disk (or, in Android's case, to flash). But unlike Ubuntu's running on random PC's, with users downloading the latest (possibly buggy) Nvidia drivers, handset manufacturers test their systems very carefully before they let them ship."

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