(
EXTended file system) The first file system developed exclusively for the Linux operating system. Introduced in 1992, the limits of the Minix file system originally used in Linux were greatly increased: volume size from 64MB to 2GB, and file names from 14 to 255 characters. Ext also introduced a virtual file system (VFS) interface, which allows different underlying architectures to be used.
ext2, ext3, ext4
In 1993, ext2 added the traditional Unix inode and other features of the Unix File System (see
inode and
UFS). Maximum volume size jumped to 32TB.
Introduced in 2001, the major enhancement to ext3 was three levels of journaling, the most robust of which duplicates the indexes and file contents in the journal before updating the actual file system (see
journaling file system). See
file system.
In 2008, ext4 added several enhancements for large files: maximum volume size increased to one exabyte and file size to 16TB.