the disgruntled Linux surgeon

Recently I have converted my root and home partitions to the ext4 filesystem! I notice that system is a little snappier but that could just be a placebo effect. However the big win is fsck time. It takes much less time to fsck partitions.

I am using Grub2 for a long time, and recently it got ext4 support ( currently using 1.97-beta3 from experimental ) so I didn't have to do anything extra to boot from the ext4 root partition. If your bootloader doesn't support ext4 you will need a separate /boot.

! BACKUP ! BACKUP ! never hurts to backup.

The conversion is very easy , boot your system in single user mode and make sure the partition you want to convert is mounted read only. Then run the two following commands :

tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/dev-name
fsck -pf /dev/dev-name

and reboot. Voila!

There are other guides online too which I used for reference.

Happy testing!