“‘I’ve just released the 2.6.23-rc9-ext4-1. It collapses some
patches in preparation for pushing them to Linus, and adds some of
the cleanup patches that had been incorporated into Andrew’s
broken-out-2007-10-01-04-09 series,’ announced Theodore Ts’o. He
also noted of the current ext4 git tree, ‘it also has some new
development patches in the unstable (not yet ready to push to
mainline) portion of the patch series.’ In an earlier thread
Theodore posted a series of patches specifically intended for
inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel. Included in the patch
series was a patch for improving fsck performance, ‘in performance
tests testing e2fsck time, we have seen that e2fsck time on ext3
grows linearly with the total number of inodes in the filesytem. In
ext4 with the uninitialized block groups feature, the e2fsck time
is constant, based solely on the number of used inodes rather than
the total inode count…'”