ConstantThought

I have read a number of Unix histories which must have used this 1979 paper as a source, but I only just read the paper itself recently. It is by Dennis Ritchie himself (he is one of the fathers of Unix), and discusses the very birth of Unix from an inside perspective. While information on the hardware is not enormously interesting anymore, the bits about its incremental development and the birth of some things we take completely for granted now (modern pipelining) are fascinating.

To quote: The ext3 filesystem is a journaling extension to the standard ext2 filesystem on Linux.

What's interesting here is that it's basically just the unjournalled ext2 filesystem, but with journalling added on. Even with journalling, it's still ext2. That is, an ext3 filesystem is still an ext2 filesystem. For that matter, an ext2 filesystem is already basically an ext3 filesystem. The matter of how and where journalling actually comes in to play is really quite interesting.