Michael Larabel at Phoronix is reporting that the latest Google Android, codename Gingerbread, will use ext4 instead of the YAFFS filesystem currently deployed.
Ext4 is the fourth extended journaling filesystem for Linux and the successor to ext3.
“Of course,” Larabel said, “it’s also up to the phone vendor as simply flashing your firmware won’t reformat your disk storage with a new file-system. One of the first phones to use ext4 with Android 2.3 is the new Google Nexus S smart-phone.”
The move to ext4 will have some impact on how developers code their Android applications.
Google’s Tim Bray said that ext4 “buffers much more aggressively; thus you need to be more assertive about making sure your data gets to permanent storage when you want it to.”