Why was ext2 created?
In April 1992, the ext filesystem was written by Remy Card to address two key limitations with the Minix filesystem, which had previously been the only filesystem available to Linux: filenames could be only 14 characters, and the maximum file system size supported by Minix was 64MB. The ext filesystem supported block devices up to 2GB, and file names up to 255 characters, but (like Minix) it only had a single timestamp for last modification time, last access time, and inode change time. It also used linked lists to store free blocks, which meant that files tended to get fragmented very easily. In January, 1993, the ext2 filesystem was released which further increased the maximum block size to 4TB, added POSIX timestamps, and supported variable block sizes. More importantly, it added support for extensibility so that new features could be added to the filesystem.
