The Kernel Column with Jon Masters – The Kernel 3.6

Linux 3.6 includes a number of changes to file systems and block devices. For starters, it should be ‘reliable’ to run swap over NFS, meaning that those truly diskless network-booted systems requiring swap can do so over the network. This was always possible to an extent, but now it is expected to work ‘reliably’ (this author uses quotation marks because there are still many things that can go wrong with this approach). In addition, 3.6 includes reworked quota support on both Btrfs and ext4 file systems. The former gains support for subvolume (smaller volumes made on the fly by users) quotas, and a new send/ recv serialisation technology that allows for fast incremental backup of snapshots, for example to keep a remote copy of a volume in sync. Not to be outdone, ext4 removes the special files it had been using for quota support and fully integrates quotas into the file system metadata.