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ext4 - Wikipedia

ext4

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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 Lustre file system between 2003 and 2006, meant to extend storage limits and add other performance improvements.1 However, other Linux kernel developers opposed accepting extensions to ext3 for stability reasons,2 and proposed to fork the source code of ext3, rename it as ext4, and perform all the development there, without affecting existing ext3 users. This proposal was accepted, and on 28 June 2006, Theodore Ts’o, the ext3 maintainer, announced the new plan of development for ext4.3

A preliminary development version of ext4 was included in version 2.6.194 of the Linux kernel. On 11 October 2008, the patches that mark ext4 as stable code were merged in the Linux 2.6.28 source code repositories,5 denoting the end of the development phase and recommending ext4 adoption. Kernel 2.6.28, containing the ext4 filesystem, was finally released on 25 December 2008.6 On 15 January 2010, Google announced that it would upgrade its storage infrastructure from ext2 to ext4.7 On 14 December 2010, Google also announced it would use ext4, instead of YAFFS, on Android 2.3.8

Its improvements over ext3 include a date range that ends in the year 2446 instead of 2038, a timestamp accuracy of a nanosecond instead of one second, and higher size limits.910

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. Mathur, Avantika; Cao, MingMing; Bhattacharya, Suparna; Dilger, Andreas; Zhuravlev (Tomas), Alex; Vivier, Laurent (2007). “The new ext4 filesystem: current status and future plans” (PDF). Proceedings of the Linux Symposium. Ottawa, ON, CA: Red Hat. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 July 2010. Retrieved 15 January 2008. ↩

  2. Torvalds, Linus (9 June 2006). “extents and 48bit ext3”. Linux kernel mailing list. ↩

  3. Ts’o, Theodore (28 June 2006). “Proposal and plan for ext2/3 future development work”. Linux kernel mailing list. ↩

  4. Leemhuis, Thorsten (23 December 2008). “Higher and further: The innovations of Linux 2.6.28 (page 2)”. Heise Online. Archived from the original on 3 January 2009. Retrieved 9 January 2010. ↩

  5. “ext4: Rename ext4dev to ext4”. Linus’ kernel tree. Retrieved 20 October 2008. ↩

  6. Leemhuis, Thorsten (23 December 2008). “Higher and further: The innovations of Linux 2.6.28”. Heise Online. ↩

  7. Paul, Ryan (15 January 2010). “Google upgrading to Ext4, hires former Linux Foundation CTO”. Ars Technica. ↩

  8. “Android 2.3 Gingerbread to use Ext4 file system”. The H Open. 14 December 2010. ↩

  9. ext4: Fix handling of extended tv_sec - kernel/git/stable/linux.git - Linux kernel stable tree ↩

  10. “ext4 General Information — The Linux Kernel documentation”. Retrieved 17 August 2025. ↩

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