In its very early days, Linux was cross-developed under the Minix operating system. It was easier to share disks between the two systems than to design a new filesystem, so Linus Torvalds decided to implement support for the Minix filesystem in Linux. The Minix filesystem was an efficient and relatively bug-free piece of software.
However, the restrictions in the design of the Minix filesystem were too limiting, so people started thinking and working on the implementation of new filesystems in Linux.
In order to ease the addition of new filesystems into
the Linux kernel, a Virtual File System (VFS) layer was developed. The VFS
layer was initially written by Chris Provenzano, and later rewritten by
Linus Torvalds before it was integrated into the Linux kernel. It will
be described in section 
of this paper.
After the integration of the VFS in the kernel, a new filesystem, called the ``Extended File System'' was implemented in April 1992 and added to Linux 0.96c. This new filesystem removed the two big Minix limitations: its maximal size was 2 giga bytes and the maximal file name size was 255 characters. It was an improvement over the Minix filesystem but some problems were still present in it. There was no support for the separate access, inode modification, and data modification timestamps. The filesystem used linked lists to keep track of free blocks and inodes and this produced bad performances: as the filesystem was used, the lists became unsorted and the filesystem became fragmented.
As a response to these problems, two new filesytems were released
in Alpha version in January 1993: the Xia filesystem and the Second Extended
File System. The Xia filesystem was heavily based on the Minix filesystem
kernel code and only added a few improvements over this filesystem. Basically,
it provided long file names, support for bigger partitions and support for
the three timestamps. On the other hand, Ext2fs was based on the Extfs code
with
many reorganizations and many improvements. It had been designed with evolution
in mind and contained space for future improvements. It will be described with
more details in section .
When the two new filesystems were first released, they provided essentially the same features. Due to its minimal design, Xia fs was more stable than Ext2fs. As the filesystems were used more widely, bugs were fixed in Ext2fs and lots of improvements and new features were integrated. Ext2fs is now very stable and has become the de-facto standard Linux filesystem.
The table contains a summary of the features
provided by the different filesystems.
Table: Summary of the filesystem features