by jeff clark on Sun Oct 12, 2008 2:29 pm
My understanding is that because ext3 is a journaled filesystem, it takes more time writing to disk because it's got to update the journal before writing the file. It also reserves space on disk for the journal.
A dedicated /boot partition which consists of files like the kernel and supporting config files which are rarely (if ever) written don't need the overhead of a journaled system, so a simpler system like ext2 is sufficient.