The road to ext4

As many of you know, ext4 has now been marked stable as from kernel 2.6.28. If you are running a recent system, it is recommended you get the most up to date e2fsprogs-libs e2fsprogs. I have emerged the testing ones on my Gentoo.

Next is to enable ext4 on your kernel then compile a recent 2.6.28 or above. Once done, you can then create your new file systems using the simple command: mkfs.ext4 /dev/blah. You can also convert your existing ext3fs partitions like this (but beware that it will make them incompatible with ext3): tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/blah.

If all works well, you should get something in the line of this when mounting the FS:

kjournald2 starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT4 FS on sdd1, internal journal on sdd1:8
EXT4-fs: delayed allocation enabled
EXT4-fs: file extents enabled
EXT4-fs: mballoc enabled
EXT4-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.