Ext4 Inodes and Extents: A Hands-On Exercise
A step-by-step lab on ext4 internals. Create files, inspect their inodes and extents, force fragmentation, and watch what happens to metadata before and after deletion.
A step-by-step lab on ext4 internals. Create files, inspect their inodes and extents, force fragmentation, and watch what happens to metadata before and after deletion.
Files deleted with `rm` don’t vanish instantly. Ext4 leaves behind traces — shadows on disk — that can sometimes be recovered with tools like debugfs. Let’s look behind the curtain.
A narrative walkthrough of what happens when you write a file to disk (through the page cache, extents, and journaling) and deletion with `rm`. Think "Lord of the Rings," but for inodes.