journalling file systems

Simon Fowler simon at himi.org
Fri Nov 30 12:04:49 EST 2001


On Fri, Nov 30, 2001 at 11:48:48AM +1100, Matthew Hawkins wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Nov 2001, Damien Elmes wrote:
> > I think the fact that Redhat saw fit to introduce ext3 in their latest
> > distribution says something good.
> 
> The author of ext3 is a Redhat employee, and they've no doubt long been
> embarrased by the fact that their competitor SuSE have included a stable
> journaling filesystem in their distribution for years, one which Redhat
> have never included due to NIH syndrome.
> 
Stephen Tweedie was the original developer of ext3, but most of the
current work is being done by Andrew Morton . . . And I'm not even
sure sct was working at RH when he did that development. 

On top of that, Reiserfs has had a number of quite serious problems
over the last couple of years - it's good when it's good, but
problems come up more often than they really should with a stable
production quality filesystem. Since it went into the mainline
kernel it's become /much/ more stable, and the last of the niggling
bugs are being dealt with, but before that it's been something of a
gamble.

As for ext3, it's /good/ - it's not a jury rigged journalled
filesystem like a lot of people like to accuse it of being. It's got
all the advantages that ext2 has (which are a lot - ext2 is a very
nice filesystem), and it has a full-featured journalling layer as
well. 

Really, it's rather a moot point - as things stand, there are four
full journalled filesystems available, two of them in the mainline
kernel as of 2.4.16. Both the ones in the kernel are currently ready
for production use. It makes very little difference which you pick,
unless you're hitting one of the specific areas where each fs
specialises (streaming media for xfs, lots of small files for
reiser, or ext2 compatibility for ext3).

Simon

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