journalling file systems

[Damien Elmes]

Kim Holburn <kim.holburn at anu.edu.au> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> Anyone know how stable these are? reiserfs, ext3, is there one most
> people have settled on yet? RH7.2 has ext3 is this useable/stable,
> with nfs?

I started using ext3 on this little laptop-based mp3 player for the
car that I've built (http://repose.cx/muse), because I didn't feel
like using batteries in it or builting a shutdown circuit, and
mounting the drive read-only was not an option as I wanted certain
state data to be persistant over stops and starts.

It's been great. A month or two later I moved my development boxes
over to it, too, and they have also been running well. 

Moving from ext2 -> ext3 is a matter of

$ tune2fs -j /dev/drive

No need to unmount, sync, etc. You can do it live.

And then restarting with a new kernel and a quick change to
/etc/fstab. Provided the drive is unmounted cleanly, you can even load
it up on a standard ext2 kernel.

There is also evidence to show it results in a net speed *gain* in
certain circumstances, due to the way data can be grouped together
before writing (I think that's how it works).

I've heard mixed things about reiser, some people swear by it, but
others have reported filesystem corruption and wouldn't touch it with
a ten-foot pole. My reasons for avoiding it are somewhat more
whimsical - the lead developer irks me :-)

XFS is apparently good, although it was not build a linux's VFS, and
it shows, what with certain features being unusable under linux at the
moment (drive size limits, etc.)

I think the fact that Redhat saw fit to introduce ext3 in their latest
distribution says something good. While redhat hardly have a
reputation for a rock solid distribution, there are some bright chaps
working there. 

(speaking as a Debian man).

Cheers :-)

-- 
Damien Elmes
resolve at repose.cx