4.4. Mounting an ext4 File System
An ext4 file system can be mounted with no extra options, same as any other file system:
~]# mount block_device /mount/point
The default mount options are optimal for most users. Options, such as
acl, noacl, data, quota, noquota, user_xattr, nouser_xattr, and many others that were already used with the ext2 and ext3 file systems, are backward compatible and have the same usage and functionality. Also, with the ext4 file system, several new ext4-specific mount options have been added, for example:
- barrier / nobarrier
- By default, ext4 uses write barriers to ensure file system integrity even when power is lost to a device with write caches enabled. For devices without write caches, or with battery-backed write caches, you disable barriers using the
nobarrieroption:~]#
mount -o nobarrier block_device /mount/point - stripe=value
- This option allows you to specify the number of file system blocks allocated for a single file operation. For RAID5 this number should be equal the RAID chunk size multiplied by the number of disks.
- journal_ioprio=value
- This option allows you to set priority of I/O operations submitted during a commit operation. The option can have a value from 7 to 0 (0 is the highest priority), and is set to 3 by default, which is slightly higher priority than the default I/O priority.
Default mount options can be also set in the file system superblock using the
tune4fs utility. For example, the following command sets the file system on the /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02 device to be mounted by default with debugging disabled and user-specified extended attributes and Posix access control lists enabled:
~]# tune4fs -o ^debug,user_xattr,acl /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02
For more information on this topic, refer to the
tune4fs(8) manual page.
An ext3 file system can also be mounted as ext4 without changing the format, allowing it to be mounted as ext3 again in the future. To do so, run the following command on a block device that contains an ext3 file system:
~]# mount -t ext4 block_device /mount/point
Doing so will only allow the ext3 file system to use ext4-specific features that do not require a file format conversion. These features include
delayed allocation and multi-block allocation, and exclude features such as extent mapping.
Warning
Using the ext4 driver to mount an ext3 file system has not been fully tested on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Therefore, this action is not supported because Red Hat cannot guarantee consistent performance and predictable behavior for ext3 file systems in this way.
For more information on mount options for the ext4 file system, see Section 2.2.2, “Specifying the Mount Options” and the
mount(8) manual page.
Note
If you want to enable persistent mounting of the file system, remember to update the
/etc/fstab file accordingly. For example:
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02 /test ext4 defaults 0 0
