It all started back in the good ol’ days of the Jaunty development cycle when I heard this new fangled filesystem thingy called ext4 was going to be an option in Jaunty. It claimed to be faster with much shorter fsck times. So, like any good Ubuntu developer, I tried it. It was indeed noticeably faster and fsck times were much improved.

The honeymoon was over when I ended up hitting bug #317781. That was no fun as it ate several virtual machines and quite a few other things (I had backups for all but the VMs). This machine is on a UPS, uses raid1, and on modern hardware (dual core Intel system with 4GB of RAM). In other words, this is not some flaky system but one that normally is only rebooted when there is a kernel upgrade.

rest here