AB
Developer(s)Mingming Cao, Andreas Dilger, Alex Zhuravlev (Tomas), Dave Kleikamp, Theodore Ts’o, Eric Sandeen, Sam Naghshineh, others
Full nameFourth extended file system
Introduced10 October 2006 with Linux 2.6.19
Preceded byext3
Partition IDs0x83: MBR / EBR.
EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7: GPT Windows BDP.1
0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4: GPT Linux filesystem data.1
933AC7E1-2EB4-4F13-B844-0E14E2AEF915: GPT /home partition.2
3B8F8425-20E0-4F3B-907F-1A25A76F98E8: GPT /srv (server data) partition.
Structures
Directory contentsLinked list, hashed B-tree
File allocationExtents / Bitmap
Bad blocksTable
Limits
Max volume size1 EiB
Max file size16–256 TiB (for 4–64 KiB block size)
Max no. of files4 billion (specified at filesystem creation time)
Max filename length255 bytes (fewer for multibyte character encodings such as Unicode)
Allowed filename
characters
All characters and character sequences permitted, except for NULL (‘\0’), ’/’, and the special file names ”.” and ”..” which are reserved for indicating (respectively) current and parent directories.
Features
Dates recordedModification (mtime), data or attribute modification (ctime), access (atime), deletion (dtime), creation (crtime)
Date range14 December 1901 – 10 May 24463
Date resolutionNanosecond
ForksNo
Attributesacl, bh, bsddf, commit=nrsec, data=journal, data=ordered, data=writeback, delalloc, extents, journal_dev, mballoc, minixdf, noacl, nobh, nodelalloc, noextents, nomballoc, nombcache, nouser_xattr, oldalloc, orlov, user_xattr
File system
permissions
Unix permissions, POSIX ACLs
Transparent
compression
No
Transparent
encryption
Yes
Data deduplicationNo
Copy-on-writeNo
Other
Supported
operating systems
• Linux
• FreeBSD (full read/write support since version 12.0)
• macOS (read-only with ext4fuse, full with ExtFS)
• Windows (read–write without journaling with ext2fsd)
• KolibriOS (read-only)

ext4

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Footnotes

  1. Previously, Linux used the same GUID for the data partitions as Windows (Basic data partition: EBD0A0A2- B9E5- 4433- 87C0- 68B6B72699C7). Linux never had a separate unique partition type GUID defined for its data partitions. This created problems when dual-booting Linux and Windows in UEFI-GPT setup. The new GUID (Linux filesystem data: 0FC63DAF- 8483- 4772- 8E79- 3D69D8477DE4) was defined jointly by GPT fdisk and GNU Parted developers. It is identified as type code 0x8300 in GPT fdisk. (See definitions in gdisk’s parttypes.cc) 2

  2. “DiscoverablePartitionsSpec”. freedesktop.org. Retrieved 7 April 2018.

  3. “ext4: Fix handling of extended tv_sec”. Linux-stable kernel tree. Retrieved 14 February 2017.