According to this EXT4 is a much faster file system for flash media. Can I convert 2GB /opt partition to ext4? Is this a good idea or is there obvious fail I am oblivious to? (I am running power kernel 46 which has EXT4 support).

Discuss

Real world performance analysis is non-trivial, especially on our Internet tablets, which are not made for achieving the best possible performance.

The opt files are already on ext3 which has reasonable performance on this device. I have seen no comparisons between the available file systems, so you will have to try this out.


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The risks with repartitioning the internal eMMC are obvious; failure in mounting the /home and /opt directories lead to the infamous reboot loop from which there is no other way of recovery than reflashing.

As usual, you should back up what data you hold valuable before exploring the possibilities of the device beyond what the maker considered is normal use.

Good luck !

Early versions of ext4 had issues, after a bit of googling I found this, is this issue fixed in the version of ext4 included with kernel power?

There is also the consideration that ext4 isn't included in the stock kernel, which might cause a problem if you need/want to switch back.

why not brtfs like what MeeGo uses. it is quite performant and with the ability to compress on the fly, you could save some good space too! I must admit that I don't know if power-kernel does contain the support for btrfs...

there's a patched compiled kernel somewhere in this subforum with btrfs (2 topics under this one right now), you might want to look into that

If anyone is still interested in this topic, I've created a wiki page on how to change the eMMC its filesystem:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Changing_the_eMMC_filesystem

I reformatted my /home as Reiser4 because of its transparent LZO compression support and the existence of a native kernel 2.6.28 patch. However, as it is not included in kernel-power I've oriented the wiki page as if you want to format the partition as ext4.

Additions to the wiki page are welcome of course

thanks, very much for the wiki. I managed to convert /home to ext4 with your instructions.
So now I am dependent on power kernel I guess.

Notice any improvement?

I am in bed and too lazy to Google, but is ext4 a memory format, like fat32? If you change to ext4, will you be able to store files larger than 4Gb?

Ext-filesystems with and beyond ext2 are capable of storing files larger than 4Gbs. Only FAT and alike that are 16-bit can't handle 4Gb files.