The extended file system, or ext, was implemented in April 1992 as the first file system 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, w ...

kernel. It has metadata structure inspired by traditional

Unix filesystem In Unix and operating systems inspired by it, the file system is considered a central component of the operating system. It was also one of the first parts of the system to be designed and implemented by Ken Thompson in the first experimental ...

principles, and was designed by

Rémy Card Rémy Card is a French software developer who is credited as one of the primary developers of the Extended file system (ext) and Second Extended file system (ext2) for Linux. References Bibliography * Card, Rémy. (1997) ''Programmation Linux 2 ...

to overcome certain limitations of the

MINIX file system The Minix file system is the native file system of the Minix operating system. It was written from scratch by Andrew S. Tanenbaum in the 1980s and aimed to replicate the structure of the Unix File System while omitting complex features, and was ...

. It was the first implementation that used the

virtual file system A virtual file system (VFS) or virtual filesystem switch is an abstract layer on top of a more concrete file system. The purpose of a VFS is to allow client applications to access different types of concrete file systems in a uniform way. A VFS ...

(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 In 1993, it was superseded by both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 The ext2 or second extended file system is a file system for the Linux kernel. It was initially designed by French software developer Rémy Card as a replacement for the extended file system (ext). Having been designed according to the same ...

and

Xiafs Xiafs was a file system for the Linux kernel which was conceived and developed by Frank Xia and was based on the MINIX file system. Today it is obsolete and not in use, except possibly in some historic installations. History Linux originally used ...

, 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. First published in

Other extended file systems

There are other members in the extended file system family: *

, the second extended file system. *

ext3 ext3, or third extended filesystem, is a journaled file system that is commonly used by the Linux kernel. It used to be the default file system for many popular Linux distributions. Stephen Tweedie first revealed that he was working on ext ...

, 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 for ...

, the fourth extended file system.

References

1992 software Disk file systems File systems supported by the Linux kernel {{Linux-stub

Other extended file systems

See also

References