Linux 2.6.37: Scalability Improvements Abound

“This year’s holiday kernel was 2.6.37, which was actually
released on 4 January 2011 (perhaps it’s a New Year’s kernel) and
is a good example of a kernel release during the holidays. At first
glance, one would think that it was a quiet kernel with no flaming
articles on the web or some seriously flawed benchmarks being
posted, but you didn’t see too much of that. However, there are
some great things that happened in 2.6.37 around file systems and
one really cool feature that I’ll talk about at the end of the
article.

“Improvements for ext4

“Ext4 is the proverbial little engine that could. The file
system has proven to have remarkably great performance and it
solves many (most) of the issues with ext3. However, it is still
really limited to 16 TB because the user space tools have not been
updated yet (good project if anyone is interested). In 2.6.37,
several really cool features were added to ext4, primarily around
scalability.”

Complete
Story