The extended file system, or ext, was implemented in April 1992 as the first
file system
In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one lar ...
created specifically for the
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...
kernel. It has
metadata structure inspired by traditional
Unix filesystem principles, and was designed by
Rémy Card to overcome certain limitations of the
MINIX file system.
[ It was the first implementation that used the virtual file system (VFS), for which support was added in the Linux kernel in version 0.96c, and it could handle file systems up to 2 gigabytes (GB) in size.]
ext was the first in the series of extended file systems. In 1993, it was superseded by both ext2 and Xiafs, which competed for a time, but ext2 won because of its long-term viability: ext2 remedied issues with ext, such as the immutability of inodes and fragmentation
Fragmentation or fragmented may refer to:
Computers
* Fragmentation (computing), a phenomenon of computer storage
* File system fragmentation, the tendency of a file system to lay out the contents of files non-continuously
* Fragmented distributi ...
.[ First published in ]
Other extended file systems
There are other members in the extended file system family:
* ext2, the second extended file system.
* ext3, the third extended file system.
*ext4
ext4 (fourth extended filesystem) is a journaling file system for Linux, developed as the successor to ext3.
ext4 was initially a series of backward-compatible extensions to ext3, many of them originally developed by Cluster File Systems fo ...
, the fourth extended file system.
See also
*