Arch Linux

iBertus

Member

From: Greenville, NC

Registered: 2004-11-04

Posts: 2,228

Should I switch filesystems?

Okay, so I've been thinking about switching from reiser4 to something else until it's included in the vanilla kernel. My reasoning is that I've had several errors reported by fsck on those partitions lately and a few days ago pacman-optimize couldn't match the md5sums for anything so long as /var was reiser4. I've switched back to reiserfs on /var for now.

Although I like reiser4, I'm turned off by the sudden updates to the filesystem that rendered old version of the tools useless. I've heard that ext3 can be made quite fast and I'm experienced with plain old reiser3.6. I'm considering a mix and match setup of different filesystems for different needs. My main usage is media files, large GIS datasets and games. What filesystem would anyone recommend for this pattern of usage?

JGC

Developer

Registered: 2003-12-03

Posts: 1,664

Re: Should I switch filesystems?

For large files, XFS is fast. For small files, it's slow as hell. I'm running quite some boxes with XFS as filesystem for everything except /var: I use ext3 for that on those boxes.

Reiser4 is nice, but not these days. I know about when Reiser3 got into the kernel, it took them 10 releases to get a decent filesystem (mkreiserfs tells you about using 2.4.18 or 2.4.20 at least, when looking at the version where it was included at first.... horrible)

I tried JFS, XFS, ext3, Reiserfs, but all have one thing in common: they get slow when you fill it up. I think JFS, ReiserFS and XFS are not that much different from eachother when it comes to performance. Ext3 however has problems with directories with a huge amount of files in it.

dtw

Forum Fellow

From: UK

Registered: 2004-08-03

Posts: 4,439

Website

Re: Should I switch filesystems?

What's up with resier4 then at the moment?  Did I miss something?

iBertus

Member

From: Greenville, NC

Registered: 2004-11-04

Posts: 2,228

Re: Should I switch filesystems?

What's up with resier4 then at the moment?  Did I miss something?

One thing is that the latest release of namesys' patchset broke compatibility with anything using the older patchset. This cost me half a day last week because I didn't know about the change and archie wouldn't read the reiser4 partitions anymore. Now, I'm starting to get strange errors about missing nodes on my reiser4 partitions.