Executive summary: ext4 rocks, check the numbers at the end!

With 2.6.28 arriving over Xmas I took the opportunity to upgrade my home desktop and laptop to it (the laptop had been running a number of RC releases quite happily). Everything was happy so I thought I’d try migrating my /home partition to ext4, but before I started I decided to run a quick Bonnie++ comparison between XFS and the new stable ext4 from the console before the rsync. The (very) rough numbers were:

I didn’t note down the rest. So not a lot of difference there (or so I thought, but more on that in a bit). Using rsync to copy all my data over didn’t take too long and a quick shuffle of UUID’s in /etc/fstab and I rebooted and was happily using my shiny new ext4 logical volume. Everything was working fine but it wasn’t until I was poking in the logs a day or two later that I noticed this:

EXT4-fs warning (device dm-13): ext4_fill_super: extents feature not enabled on this filesystem, use tune2fs.

That’s unusual because since 2.6.23 that was meant to be enabled by default. A quick play with tune2fs under both Ubuntu Hardy and Intrepid showed that they didn’t support that option so I ended up grabbing
e2fsprogs from SourceForge and building it myself. With that done I could use its mkfs.ext4 command to build a fully functional ext4 filesystem and get the far better message:

EXT4-fs: file extents enabled

Another long rsync later and I was up and running with ext4 with all the features I wanted.

Of course this meant that my initial ext4 numbers were without extents, so I’ve just done another run (though this time with X and a full KDE 4 session going) and was blown away by the results:

Version 1.03b       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
quad            16G           68123  17 30013   6           64239   8 363.1   1
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16 +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++
quad,16G,,,68123,17,30013,6,,,64239,8,363.1,1,16,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++

real    18m18.005s
user    0m1.280s
sys     1m46.434s

That’s a full 2 minutes faster (and then some) and the I/O is just enormous!

So here’s that first table again, but with an extra column for ext4 with extents:

This looks fun.. 😉