[Verizon Droid Charge] buhohitr:
Here is the article (try not to provide extra link from this site):

Should I use EXT4?

First, a little background information... I'm going to cover some technical stuff here so try to hang on.

RFS and EXT4 are both file systems. They are what tells the system where in the memory of the phone to find files. Both RFS and EXT4 have different methods on how they store file system meta data that describes how the files are stored, indexed, etc.

Let's first cover RFS. RFS has it's roots in FAT and FAT32, you'll probably remember this from the dark old days of DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 9x.

In order for Android to run safely, the system must have file system permissions to make sure that no process can read/write to a file that it doesn't have the permissions to operate on. This is done through a series of permissions sometimes known as POSIX permissions, from Linux. Another thing Android must have to run safely is something called File System Journaling. File System Journaling is a system that keeps track of the changes that will be made in a journal (usually a circular log in a dedicated area of the file system) before committing them to the main file system. In the event of a system crash or power failure, such file systems are quicker to bring back online and far less likely to become corrupted.

RFS, because it's based on FAT/FAT32, didn't have all of the above features needed to run Android properly and safely. Samsung, in the development of their Android systems, made RFS by taking FAT/FAT32 and bolted on POSIX permissions and File System Journaling. Some say that this has made for an ugly file system.

EXT4 is another file system, if you know Linux then you're going to definitely know what this is. EXT4 was built with File System Journaling and POSIX Permissions from the very start and by doing so some people say that it doesn't suffer from the performance issues that RFS has because of it's "bolted on" nature.

What does this all mean for me? The user of the Samsung Droid Charge?

Well, some people say that by converting to EXT4 via something called "Voodoo Lag Fix" will increase the performance of the phone. This was the case when we were running Froyo-based ROMs. Now that we are running Gingerbread-based ROMs, the performance difference isn't as large of a gap between RFS and EXT4. Back when Froyo was the norm, RFS performance was atrocious and converting to EXT4 dramatically increased the performance of the phone.

Fast-forward to Gingerbread on the Droid Charge. The performance of RFS isn't that bad, in fact it's close to the performance of EXT4 due to some major tweaks to the file system driver that Samsung made for RFS. Granted, it's no EXT4 but it's definitely not as bad as it once was in the dark old days of Froyo.

So... the question that everyone has on their minds is; Should I use EXT4?

In my opinion, the answer is no and I stand by that answer. There is no reason to convert to EXT4 now that the performance of RFS is close to the performance of EXT4. Most people will not be able to tell the difference between a phone running RFS and a phone running EXT4. Yeah, you might get better Quadrant Scores but Quadrant Scores aren't the end-all-be-all of phone performance. If my phone runs well, is stable, and does what I want it do, that's all that should matter and not some Quadrant Benchmark Score.

There have been reports that people who have converted to EXT4 later ended up with a phone that's completely bricked. I mean, it's about as good as a doorstop. It turns out that a part of the phone's internal flash memory has been shown to become so badly corrupted under EXT4 that you can't read it, wipe it, delete data from it, etc. This results in the inability to flash any ROM to the phone since the flash memory itself is corrupted beyond repair and the only thing you can do is swap the hardware out.

This is why my opinion is that it's best to simply stay on RFS and forget about converting to EXT4.

Page Last Modified On: February 19, 2012 at 2:19 pm

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