The ext2 filesystem has been the standard Linux filesystem for many years. It has generally good performance for most applications, but it does not offer any journaling capability. This makes it unsuitable for very large filesystems, since fscks can take an extremely long time. In addition, ext2 has some built-in limitations due to the fact that every ext2 filesystem has a fixed number of inodes that it can hold. That being said, ext2 is generally considered to be an extremely robust and efficient non-journalled filesystem.

• In kernels: 2.0+
• journaling: no
• mkfs command: mke2fs
• mkfs example: mke2fs /dev/hdc7
• related commands: debugfs, tune2fs, chattr
• performance-related mount options: noatime, nodiratime