The Second Extended File System has been designed and implemented to fix some problems present in the first Extended File System. Our goal was to provide a powerful filesystem, which implements Unix file semantics and offers advanced features.
Of course, we wanted to Ext2fs to have excellent performance. We also wanted to provide a very robust filesystem in order to reduce the risk of data loss in intensive use. Last, but not least, Ext2fs had to include provision for extensions to allow users to benefit from new features without reformatting their filesystem.