[SOLVED]Should /boot partition be formated in ext2 or ext4?

Question

I used to format /boot partition in ext2 when installing Arch Linux.
Can /boot partition be formatted in ext4?
Is there any advantage when using ext4 over ext2 in /boot ?
I heared that ext2 is more stable than ext4.
Last edited by yuanzhi (2012-12-22 06:01:10)

Answer 1

You can use anything you like for a separate /boot partition, provided both Linux and your boot loader can read it -- ext2, ext4, XFS, HFS+, FAT, etc. Some of these filesystems do have limitations, though. For instance, since FAT doesn't support symbolic links, you can't do something like link a kernel with a generic name to one with a more specific name. I've seen some configurations that rely on such things, and they wouldn't work with FAT.
As to ext2fs vs. ext4fs specifically, ext4fs won't have many advantages; its journal and other advanced features will be of little importance on such a small partition. Ext4fs might be a tiny bit faster, especially if you've got an EFI-based system and are using the EFI filesystem drivers, but this effect will usually be so small that it qualifies as negligible. I'm not sure about reliability, but I'd expect that any reliability problems with ext4fs would be pretty well eliminated by now.
Personally, I've been using ext2fs on most of my systems' /boot partitions until recently. I've begun using FAT or ReiserFS more recently, but only because I'm using EFI and am loading my kernels off of these partitions. In this environment, FAT is better because it's the EFI's native filesystem, and ReiserFS has a speed advantage over ext2fs or ext4fs because of quirks of the add-on EFI drivers for these filesystems. These are rather specialized reasons to favor these filesystems, though. FWIW, Fedora, which uses a separate /boot partition by default, has been using ext4fs on its /boot for a while now.