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73416ba
(Get the code!)
Another possibility is to use the Karmic kernel but keep a Jaunty userspace. I haven't tried this myself, but I suspect it is highly likely to work.
As far as people complaining --- please note that (a) Ubuntu has not made this the default, and (b) when I talked to the Canonical kernel team, they were using ext4 and very happy with it; they weren't seeing this problem; (c) I've not been able to reproduce the problem, even using some of the Python reproduction scripts provided here, on a 1024meg Atom netbook running Jaunty. It may be because I (and the canonical kernel team) don't run some critical program which is needed to enable this bug to trigger. (d) From working with the people who *can* trigger this bug reliably, it seems to be related to the Ubuntu specific backports of ext4 patches; if those 10 patches are removed, the system is stable. With *any* upstream kernel, either before, after, or at the Jaunty snapshot, these problems don't show (at least for the people who have done testing for me and who are able to replicate bug --- as I've said, I can't reproduce it all on my systems).
As far as jagnet's report that he sees hangs when deleting large number of files using ext3 with the Jaunty kernel --- that's interesting. I don't know how to square that with people who took the stock kernel at the Jaunty snapshot point, saw that they had no problems, applied the Ubuntu-specific ext4 patches from the Jaunty "sauce" (aka 'value-added' distribution patches) and then were able to reproduce system hangs when deleting files.
In any case, I'm a volunteer, and I do ext4 development largely on my own time. I'm not paid to support Ubuntu. So I have to ration my ext4 late-night development hours carefully, and there's been a lot of need of my time to get fixes and support for 64-bit e2fsprogs in upstream. And unfortunately, there is no paid Ubuntu resource supporting ext4, at least as far as I know. Eric Sandeen, on the other hand, is a Red Hat employee, who has spent a *huge* amount of his time (both paid and personal time) helping to make sure that Fedora 11's ext4 was rock solid stable. As a former SGI employee employed to work on XFS, he's extended the XFS test suite to work on ext4, and we're using it to make sure that the upstream ext4 is rock-solid stable, and he's been using it to make sure F11's ext4 is highly stable. I'm sorry I can't spend more time working on Ubuntu's ext4, but at the end of the day it boils down to time management --- especially when there are workarounds such as using the Karmic kernel or using upstream kernel. I'm sorry for those of you using proprietary drivers, but there's a reason upstream kernel developers aren't terribly fond of such things.