filesystems

[Taavi Burns]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2004 at 02:26:29AM -0400, David J Patrick wrote:
> >I've had nothing but great experiences with XFS. 
> 
> Do you use really large files ? (as SGI designed xfs to do ?
> 
> >Not so much with Reiser
> 
> breakage ?

Reiser had some stability issues in its early life.  The versions
in recent kernels are reputed to be pretty damn stable, though.

> OK, fast & stable; xfs ?

Fast for big files...

If you want fast for small files, the only choice is ReiserFS.

> soon (maybe) to be reiser4 ?

Not all journalling fileystems are equal.  Reiser, XFS, and JFS
all (afaik, definitely doublecheck on your own) do only metadata
journalling, not file content journalling.  THere are horror stories
(more with old reiser; not sure if it's still an issue) where
you would get half of a file update to disk.  The file structure
is always valid (metadata journalling) but the actual file contents
are not protected in any meaningful way; certain parts of a file
may or may not make it out of cache and onto disk in the order
that you think you wrote them.

ext3 does full filesystem journalling: metadata and file data.  This
probably makes it the slowest of all of them, but it's also the
most compatible (it's actually ext2 with a journal attached) and
the journal handles all of the data, so partial writes actually
look like partial writes in the correct order.

I believe that reiser4 is supposed to do full journalling.  It will
be a while before it will be stable, though.  Filesystems take
a long time to burn-in.  ;)

> Are different filesystems more appropriate for certain partitions ? boot 
> ? windoze accessible ?

The only filesystems that Windows can read and Linux can write to,
both without help from funky 3rd party drivers or software, would
be FAT (fat16/32/vfat/whatever).

Linux can write to NTFS in a very limited fashion now, or there is a driver
harness available now that can actually load and use the windows ntfs driver
object code.  Daemon-tools (NOT the djb stuff for UNIX!) for Windows may be
able to read and write to some types of Linux filesystems...or so I may
have heard.

-- 
taa

   The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility.
   And vice versa.
      - Robert A. Heinlein
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