Converting filesystem to ext4

mrinehart93

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Hey guys. I was just reading about how Gingerbread is now using ext4 as the filesystem instead of yaffs2. I also just read about some devs getting FroYo to work with ext4 as the filesystem... So, wouldn't it be cool to have our phones using ext4 instead of yaffs2?

Benefits/more details about this: Yaffs Vs Ext4 | The Android Phone

Anyone want to join in on this? Note I won't be trying this out until I get AOSP/CyanogenMod working first.
 

mrinehart93

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I was working on converting to ext2

Eh, ext2 wouldn't be such a good idea (imo). If you don't do ext4, then ext3 would be better. I only say that because ext2 lacks journaling support, so in the case of a sudden, improper shutdown, the ROM (as well as anything else that is formatted ext2) might get fubar'd. ext3 adds journaling support, and ext4 just supports larger directory trees, as well as a slight performance boost. I'm kind of thinking a JFS filesystem would be good, since it handles smaller files (like what is in Android) more efficiently.
 

Nick7

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Eh, ext2 wouldn't be such a good idea (imo). If you don't do ext4, then ext3 would be better. I only say that because ext2 lacks journaling support, so in the case of a sudden, improper shutdown, the ROM (as well as anything else that is formatted ext2) might get fubar'd. ext3 adds journaling support, and ext4 just supports larger directory trees, as well as a slight performance boost. I'm kind of thinking a JFS filesystem would be good, since it handles smaller files (like what is in Android) more efficiently.

There are scripts that can check at boot time. Worked well on the Samsung Moment.
 

beezy

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Ive been messing around with this since day one.Here's how i think about it. Ext 2 is nice and everything should work but you have to much of a chance lossing data or corrupting the sdcard. Ext 3 is okay but the journaling just seems to bog down to much. Ext 4 works great for this IF the sdcard is higher class,maily something like class 10,class6 is the lowest i would go at all.
 

mrinehart93

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Ive been messing around with this since day one.Here's how i think about it. Ext 2 is nice and everything should work but you have to much of a chance lossing data or corrupting the sdcard. Ext 3 is okay but the journaling just seems to bog down to much. Ext 4 works great for this IF the sdcard is higher class,maily something like class 10,class6 is the lowest i would go at all.

... Why would the sdcard matter lol? We're talking about (or at least I am) about changing the internal flash memory filesystem to ext2/3/4, not the sdcard.
 

beezy

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... Why would the sdcard matter lol? We're talking about (or at least I am) about changing the internal flash memory filesystem to ext2/3/4, not the sdcard.

Oops,call my last reply a blonde moment.lol Then yes i agree with you 100% if i were to use any it would be ext4.:p
 

mrinehart93

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Oops,call my last reply a blonde moment.lol Then yes i agree with you 100% if i were to use any it would be ext4.:p

Haha. So what do you think we could do with this? Is it possible? I'm sure we could implement it sort of like the firerat MTD partition mod.
 

beezy

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Haha. So what do you think we could do with this? Is it possible? I'm sure we could implement it sort of like the firerat MTD partition mod.

Anything is possible with android,you know that from messing with the hero. That phone did things people only dreamed it could do.I bet there is away to do it along the lines of how firerat is done.I haven't messed around with it as much lately as i was cause i had so many things going that i thought i would never get caught up.lol Im going to start focusing more on it now and see what all we can come up with.

Beezy can you explain how you do that?

Sent from my LS670 using Tapatalk

That's more of a hack done with a sdcard which is being worked on and getting fine toned, this will require the high class sdcard like i was talking about earlier.It's not to far from being out in the wild;)
 

Nick7

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Even though the scripts can check for corruption, they wouldn't be able to repair the corrupted files would they?

Well I'm sure they could. On the Moment we had kernel level checks at boot that checked for consistency and then repaired if necessary. I don't see why a script couldn't do that.
 

Joeseph Mother

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I just set up the kernels & recoveries for the samsung intercept & acclaim to convert from rfs, on both of those what I've recommended & people have liked is going to ext2 for system, and ext4 for data and cache. Ext2 is only volatile on writing, and system is read-only 95% of the time, so the chances of corruption that way are low. The problem we may run into is the same problem I had trying to resize the partitions, the bootloader on the hero, evo, & others that allow resizing is unlocked, I'm not sure if ours has been.
 
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KSmithInNY

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Definitely a cool project. I know I'd personally like seeing system at ext3 at a minimum but preferably ext4. Either way this would be cool to see happen.
 

HKM

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Take it from someone who been using *nix for ages ext2/ext3/ext4. I am not sure where you folks are getting your infos from as I have managed and operated 28.1TB NSS at home. All channeled from JFS2 > XFS > ZFS and then later converted to ext3 (now ext4). Never came across anything other few PNG based files which was originally compressed with tar when ran xvfz came out corrupted could be also due to using it in flash media :O which was using hardware based MG2 encryption on shadow slice.
 

simon.ponder

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Corruption

Take it from someone who been using *nix for ages ext2/ext3/ext4. I am not sure where you folks are getting your infos from as I have managed and operated 28.1TB NSS at home. All channeled from JFS2 > XFS > ZFS and then later converted to ext3 (now ext4). Never came across anything other few PNG based files which was originally compressed with tar when ran xvfz came out corrupted could be also due to using it in flash media :O which was using hardware based MG2 encryption on shadow slice.

So in English not 'Unish', you are saying that most corruption came from image files that were compressed?
 

chinochino360

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And i was starting to feel bad cause this device wasn't getting enough development, like with my old hero. But alas I was wrong... This my friends
will be a fun and interesting journey.
 

trekkie1701c

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Would be interesting to see how much of a performance boost it would give. :p Kinda been curious as to how to do it myself. Figure you'd lose all data in doing so, but a wipe every now and then usually doesn't hurt.
 

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