ChromeOS Drops Support For EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 File-Systems

Written by Michael Larabel in Google on 12 October 2014 at 10:00 AM EDT. 68 Comments
GOOGLE
For the past year Google developers have been looking at dropping support for EXT* file-systems from ChromeOS while only today it's making the rounds on the Internet and of course Linux fans are enraged.

While ChromeOS is based on Linux and EXT4 continues to be the most widely used Linux file-system and still is used by default on most Linux distributions, Google developers are dropping support for EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 file-systems from their ChromeOS user-interface.

Among the reasons for Google wanting to rid Chrome of EXT* support is over lack of easily relabeling EXT* volumes from their GUI. When any volume is inserted that has read-write privileges, you should be able to rename the volume in the same way you can rename a file, but EXT doesn't work quite that easily.


What's making the rounds today is this Chromium issue report of "Drop support for ext2/3/4 from Files.app." This issue was originally opened last November but is now generating attention. The file-system support would be dropped from the Chrome OS file manager for EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 file-systems on any external USB/SD storage devices. The fully supported file-systems endorsed by Google would be FAT and NTFS.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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