Why is Ext4 the default filesystem?
Ext4 offers a number of important performance and scalability improvements and providing this by default is valuable for our users. Ext4 is not a filesystem written from scratch but a extension of the mature and well tested Ext3 codebase which was used by default up until this release. Red Hat has a long history of participating in the development of the Ext2/3/4 codebase. Stephen Tweedie from Red Hat was the lead developer of this codebase in the past and Eric Sandeen from Red Hat is one of the current active developers of the Ext4 filesystem. Ext4 has also been experimentally supported from the Fedora 9 release onwards and has received extensive testing within Fedora as well as from upstream developers and other distributions. Note that Ext3 is still provided as alternative if you prefer the conservative choice.
