The Filesystem choice thread

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taskara · Post by **taskara** » Mon Oct 14, 2002 1:38 pm

it's not like ext3 will make your machine run like a dog or anything..

eivinn · Post by **eivinn** » Mon Oct 14, 2002 1:39 pm

That's how it sounds when people are having a war

taskara · Post by **taskara** » Mon Oct 14, 2002 1:41 pm

hehe true true

Sunner · Post by **Sunner** » Mon Oct 14, 2002 1:50 pm

Personally, I prefer XFS.

SGI has been using it in IRIX for nearly a decade, it's very scalable, and very fast.

ReiserFS is still too new for my tastes, IMO it has promise, but I wouldn't use it for production use yet.

Ext3 is what I use for our RedHat boxes at work, since it's the best FS supported by RedHat, there are ISO's from SGI that give you an XFS capable installer/kernel, but unofficial stuff has no place in a server.

therion12 · Post by **therion12** » Mon Oct 14, 2002 11:31 pm

I've tried XFS, Ext3, and ReiserFS and of the three i find ReiserFS to be the best. Personally i never had corruption issues, and the new version of it has the bugs fixed.

I have lost power already more than once and never lost data due to corruption.

MTZ · Post by **MTZ** » Tue Oct 15, 2002 8:32 am

I use Ext3 and ReiserFS since i had some data loss with XFS.

Q · Post by Q » Tue Oct 15, 2002 4:19 pm

I have found XFS to be an excellent filesystem but its support at gentoo is up and down so go for another if you want an easy life

toni · Post by **toni** » Tue Oct 15, 2002 11:43 pm

I'd stay away from XFS.
I had 2 major aliures in the last week.
It's fast, but unreliable.

ReiserFS is fast and works, but I have not tested it on my new machine.

EXT3 seems like the best choice.

FastTurtle · Post by **FastTurtle** » Fri Oct 18, 2002 3:59 pm

Glad I decided to check out the forum again. Everyone who's chimed in on the XFS issue has given me enough to rethink using it in critical locations.

Guess I'll stick with Ext3 for the stability issues. I definately don't want to loose/corupt data on my home partition.

waverider202 · Post by **waverider202** » Fri Oct 18, 2002 4:08 pm

xfs and reiser are like apples and oranges. You CANNOT compare their speeds with each other. Reiser was specifically designed with a tree search to make it really fast for lots of small files. If you need speed for that, then use reiser. Xfs was specifically designed for large files. If you need to work with large files, use xfs. Ext3 is ext2 w/ journaling. And it journals and caches EVERYTHING, making it almost impossible to lose data, but the slowest out of the 3 of them. Thats what makes linux great, you choose what best suites your needs.

progster · Post by **progster** » Fri Oct 18, 2002 4:44 pm

I never experienced any problems with xfs... does anyone have any links relating the problems mentioned above (I'll do a search later

)?

I chose to use xfs on all partitions, except /boot which has the ext2 filesystem (compatibility with grub)

~Progster

Post by **pjp** » Fri Oct 18, 2002 5:07 pm

I could be wrong, but this might be the first X vs. Y thread that hasn't degraded. Compliments to all.

Milez · Post by **Milez** » Sat Oct 19, 2002 3:45 am

Also, you might want to consider JFS. I've seen a comparison chart, and JFS seems to be significantly faster than all the other major journaling filesystems. There is a kernel patch readily available for it, and many of the gentoo provided kernel sources contain this patch.

I'm using JFS and have found it's simplicity to be comparable to XFS, plus I avoid some of these big XFS bugs. Also, so far, no file corruption, whereas it did happen to me in XFS.

progster · Post by **progster** » Sat Oct 19, 2002 6:41 pm

Is it possible to convert a xfs partition to jfs or ext3, cause I've just suffered from dataloss as well :-/

~Progster

Milez · Post by **Milez** » Sat Oct 19, 2002 6:56 pm

To the best of my knowledge, you can't *directly* convert a filesystem from one type, but instead you have to move all of your data somewhere, reformat, and move your data back.

This isn't hard though, if you have enough space on another (empty) partition.

For instance, if I want to change my /dev/hda3 partition to JFS (and assuming it's my root partition), I'd mount my /dev/hda4 partition to /backup/, then use the following command:

Code: Select all

cd /
tar lcf - .|(cd /backup; tar xpvf - )

Assuming I remembered the command correctly (99.9% sure), this will make an exact copy of your root partition in your /dev/hda4 partition (and you can watch as it does it, that's what the "v" will do).

Now, you can cd into /backup, chroot, edit your config files (most importantly your /etc/fstab) and reflect the changes in your bootloader (telling it to boot your /dev/hda4 partition as your root) and then reboot.

Then you can format /dev/hda3 as you like, mount it, and repeat the process to make it your root again.

And, of course, any other empty partition will do - it could even be on another hard drive. I hope this helps if you don't find any slicker way to convert your file system type.

AutoBot · Post by **AutoBot** » Sun Oct 20, 2002 6:55 am

Between those two choices and what your going to be doing on your system I could only recommend using ext3, I have seen corruption on all filesystems but ext3 seems less likely to give problems.

tsuru · Post by **tsuru** » Sun Oct 20, 2002 3:36 pm

Personally I have been using XFS on a SMP machine for a while and have had no file corruption issues. However in recent weeks I have been considering changing to ReiserFS because low-latency / pre-emption were not available on the xfs-sources the last time I checked (I think I the only one still using mjc-sources-2.4.19_rc1 on gentoo-stats

) Of couse I will check the latest xfs-sources before switching but so far it's not looking good for xfs. That saddens me slightly because I got my Unix start on IRIX and have been slightly biased toward / rooting for XFS since SGI announced their opensource efforts

When I first installed Gentoo back in the 1.0_rc6 days I started out using ReiserFS and everything was going great until 1.0 final came out... I don't know what cause the corruption whether it was the ReiserFS or the glibc problems that occured when 1.0 was released but either way I ended up reinstalling with XFS for safe measure. Of course both filesystems have changed greatly in the 5+ months or so since that happened and have improved stability wise.

Anywho that's my story and rationale...

AutoBot · Post by **AutoBot** » Mon Oct 21, 2002 8:27 pm

I've been happily running ReiserFS for quite some time and have lost power probably 30 times, the only issue that has arose has been a few files lost there permissions.

deaton · Post by **deaton** » Tue Oct 22, 2002 6:04 pm

I've never used XFS, but I found ext3 to be reliable. I'll also point out that I've been using reiserfs on my laptop for about 11 months without problems, first with RH 7.2, and now Gentoo 1.2. I was pleased with reiserfs enough to change my desktop from ext3 to reiserfs.

AJM · Post by **AJM** » Mon Nov 04, 2002 11:14 pm

I've used Reiserfs on my main production machine at work for two years now (yes I definately adopted it earlier than was wise

, and not had any problems up till now... I like EXT3 too, though, and tend to use it for root partitions and on machines where performance isn't an issue, but stability is.

Cloim · Post by **Cloim** » Tue Nov 05, 2002 12:02 am

I used xfs for 3 days. Power failure led to the loss of my root partition. Maybe just bad luck: power went down while it was writing the journal?.
Anyway I switched to reiser. I've since been forced to power off my computer as the result of the system locking up (several times) with only one apparent problem: my bash prompt stopped working and needed to be fixed.
I do have some data partitions that I set up as ext3, and have had no problems there either.
I'll probably switch everything to reiser eventually, though I do think ext3 is a worthy option.

henke · Post by **henke** » Tue Nov 05, 2002 12:31 am

I know xfs has xfsdump/xfsrestore utilities that makes backing up your system a lot easier.

Do the other filesystems have similar utilities?

MBCook · Post by **MBCook** » Tue Nov 05, 2002 2:29 am

Obviously, this is part opinion, but I like ext3. It's reliable, there are no questions there (XFS is a bit less mature, AFAIK). The best part is that you can easily convert a ext2 partition to ext3, and back. And if you have an ext3 partition that's been cleanly unmounted, any computer that can read ext2 can open it and access it without having to understand ext3. That said, reiser and XFS are supposed to be faster with small files, so if you do a lot of programming (or split things into tons of files) you might notice a difference using one of those two.

boyo · Post by **boyo** » Tue Nov 05, 2002 3:43 am

I've had fine results with both XFS and Reiserfs. I've stuck with the recommendations of the gentoo install docs so Reiserfs is what I'm using, but since the latest gentoo sources have XFS available I may give XFS another shot. I have been impressed with the performance of both. Like several folks have mentined earlier, ext3 is similiar to ext2 in many ways including performance, which in my experience has been nothing earth-shattering. I use ext3 on my boot partition only to make life easier when using GRUB. That's the fullest extent I've used it. It's worth mentioning that of all the file systems in question, Reiserfs seems to have the least refined toolset for maintaining and fixing the fs. I haven't been terribly impressed.

hook · Post by **hook** » Tue Nov 05, 2002 1:08 pm

ok, this will sound very very stupid, but i will still make an attempt:

what are the main characteristics of all these systems? (reiser, xfs, ext3, etc. etc.) ...i mean most of the posts were related to users personal favour.

The Filesystem choice thread

xfs and resier

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