[vox-tech] Filesystems on linux for kids.

[Peter Jay Salzman]

begin Ted Deppner <ted@psyber.com> 
> On Mon, Jul 29, 2002 at 08:08:29PM -0700, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> > i don't really see why any home user would stick with ext2.  if you want
> > a headache, i'd use reiserfs just because benchmarks say it's faster for
> > the home user than *stock* ext3.
> 
> A few weeks ago on Slashdot there was a story about a comparison between
> EXT3 and Reiser... and Ext3 was ahead in most cases.  A quick search
> should turn up the links.
 
yes, but that's not revealing the total story.  by default, ext3 uses
the "safer" ordered journaling mode.

IIRC, reiserfs kicked butt over ext3 in this mode on all benchmarks.

it's when an ext3 partition is mounted using writeback mode that it's
the clear cut winner over reiser.  the punchline is that you need to add
an option to mount.  i forget what it is, but it's something like
"journal=writeback" or something like that (prolly not right.  the man
page for mount should have it).

i'm a newbie in this area, so i have no experience or judgement about
how safe or unsafe(?) writeback mode is.  i'm guessing it's safe enough
since ext3 pretty widespread.  the kernel developers have been fairly
good about not releasing something that will trash the average joe's
system.  all the "massive filesystem corruption" warnings on kernel
cousin usually require pretty exotic conditions.

> I've run both reiser and ext3 in production and near production systems.
> 
> Early on (8-12 months ago) reiser was really flakey and NFS problematic.
> Recently, they're both very good, very high performance, etc.  Reiser has
> a clear win on being "online growable", which is useful in LVM
> environments, but EXT3 has a win because any boot disk you have can boot
> it ext2 if need be to get a production system back online (not that I've
> had to, but you have to be prepared).

yeah, that's very true.  i've had difficulty with this early on, but
IIRC, LNX-BBC even has reiserfs support these days.   so does LEAF and
the debian rescue disks.  that's good enough for me.   :)

> I prefer EXT3 at present... 2.5 series has a todo to bring growable EXT3
> into reality.  Reiser's tails are a problem for production machines, and
> reiser's hashing function(s) allow for file name collisions (rare, but
> possible).
 
i prefer ext3 also, but only because i like having a filesystem
debugger.  just in case i accidentally delete the formula for world
peace before i get a chance to back it up.

pete

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