"The Linux Foundation has pursued a two-pronged approach: (1) an incremental improvement over the current ext3 and (2) adoption of a completely new file system as a long-term remedy. The interim file system, ext4, has been in development for two years and over the next nine months will start to appear in the community editions of the top Linux distros first, he said. It will be an easy upgrade, he promised.
"Ext4 will have better performance and scalability than ext3 and is backward-compatible with 3 because it is built on the same code base; retaining the same code base, however, also limits how much it can be improved, Ts'o said."
