Arch Linux

broch

Banned

From: L.A. California

Registered: 2006-11-13

Posts: 975

Re: Suggested Filesystem??

XFS v1.0 had power down issues on intel PC hardware. This was fixed in v1.1 so there is barely any noticable power down issues compared to other comparable journaled filesystems.

XFS compared to untweaked ext3 has vastly reduced fragmentation for P2P downloading in my experience (parallel slow writes really strain cache/writting strategy).

Performance in general on a machine with ample free memory (512 mb for a file/print server) - No human visible performance difference between xfs ext3.

Stability - I had a corrupt memory stick cause a lot of junk to be written to disc on shutdown. Apparently reiser can also suffer this issue due to logical journalling, ext3 is not effected by this due to block jounalling. I've had power cuts at home with XFS with no ill affect (2 in the past year).

I have heard that the only thing which you will see human visible slowness with ext3 is deleting large files like a 600mb linux distro iso.

that is easy to explain: you are using default format settings.
increase inodes=2048, increase journal size, decrease number of allocation groups, modify fstab by adding logbufs and biosize

= no more slow pacman

no ext3 horror stories? As many as with any other fs.

KerowynM

Member

Registered: 2006-06-04

Posts: 78

Re: Suggested Filesystem??

Hi Zero, is it possible to "switch back" from Reiser to ext3 without re-installing? You can't do this "live" can you? I have been considering doing this very thing, and figured I would have to do a partimage to save off my current Arch install, reformat the partition to ext3 and then restore the partimage. Is there an easier way?

partimage wont cut it, as it will write the reiserfs partition info back over the ext3 filesystem, most likely giving you a working reiserfs partition, possibly just munging the data.

backing up the system with tar should work, thats how I swap filesystems all the time.  I use a system on another partition, a liveCD should work just as well.  I've never had a problem with /dev, I just tar it up with the rest of it, YMMV.  I've never tried to do a live backup of /, always seemed more proper just to bring it down.  Remember the -p option with tar, or the file permissions will be so hosed you will most likely reinstall.

Edit: I've heard the occasional ext3 horror story, but not nearly as much as the rest.  Never had a ext3 problem myself either.  Of course now I've gone and said it my data is doomed for sure   Certainly not as much as any other FS.  That's pretty good, considering it's probably the most used FS as well.

Last edited by KerowynM (2007-06-02 02:35:57)

ataraxia

Member

From: Pittsburgh

Registered: 2007-05-06

Posts: 1,553

Re: Suggested Filesystem??

backing up the system with tar should work, thats how I swap filesystems all the time.  I use a system on another partition, a liveCD should work just as well.  I've never had a problem with /dev, I just tar it up with the rest of it, YMMV.  I've never tried to do a live backup of /, always seemed more proper just to bring it down.  Remember the -p option with tar, or the file permissions will be so hosed you will most likely reinstall.

I did back mine up live, which is how I screwed up /dev. udev's tmpfs was mounted and masked off the "real" /dev (I used --one-file-system with tar).

Speaking of tar options, if I use tar to backup, I go with "tar -cpSf - --one-file-system --numeric-owner".

Cynical

Member

Registered: 2006-11-07

Posts: 36

Re: Suggested Filesystem??

I've tried all of them , and JFS seemed to give me the best boot times. It's comparable to XFS in speed, but is a lot more reliable if the power goes out unexpectedly. I'm not sure where some of you are getting the idea that it doesn't do journaling by default. (or full journaling, whatever that means) It also supports extents, something ext3 doesn't, which reduces fragmentation. Like stated earlier, it is very efficient.

iBertus

Member

From: Greenville, NC

Registered: 2004-11-04

Posts: 2,228

Re: Suggested Filesystem??

I've been using JFS for awhile with no problesm. I've had a few power failures and each time my system would boot without trouble. I tried reiser4 when it was in vouge, but quickly switched back to JFS when none of my MD5SUMS matched for anything. I suppose ext3 is more widely accepted as a standard but I like JFS.

pecan

Member

Registered: 2007-04-06

Posts: 93

Re: Suggested Filesystem??

ext3 is a solid filesystem, In the couple of years I've been playing with linux I've never had any issues with it. To be honest I've never used XFS or JFS, but I hear to many stories about them, combine that with the fact I've never had a problem with ext3 and theres no reason for me to use anything else. As they say, if it ain't broken don't fix it.

KomodoDave

Member

From: Oxford, UK

Registered: 2007-04-22

Posts: 162

Website

Re: Suggested Filesystem??

@OP:

I don't know what rig you're running, but if it's modern then tbh it's not really worth the faff of worrying about what fs you use.

I used to be eager to make tweaks like this, and almost always came back to the common choice; after all, there's a reason such things are the common choice (that being - they're the best choice =P).

Ext3 is great imo, and there's a ~2+ year old thread somewhere containing a handy fsck parameter posted by Gullible Jones, I believe (use advanced forum search -> author name to help find it...) that speeds things up somewhat. I tried reiserfs and noticed no speed difference whatsoever, and haven't tried JFS or XFS.

Unless performance is a real issue for you, just go for ext3. You'll have fewer problems when configuring various apps if you choose ext3 over reiserfs.

- Dave

P.S. The ext3 tweak I was thinking of uses tune2fs - you can find the info here.

Last edited by KomodoDave (2007-06-02 16:36:12)

N1ckR

Member

From: West Yorkshire, UK

Registered: 2007-05-25

Posts: 39

Website

Re: Suggested Filesystem??

I ran some tests of my own recently moving 2 gigs worth of files about, including  2 cd ISOs, various downloaded files around 100-200mb size, lots of photos from my camera, all of the files (including hidden in my home directory).

I was suprised to find that JFS and ext3 were identical for time and XFS was 10% slower.
JFS was the lowest cpu, ext3 and xfs were the same at about 10% higher.

Whats interesting is, that this does'nt match the benchmarks online, and basically to ignore benchmarking that you see report as things will vary on your specific hardware and number and size of files and read write patterns of usage as well.

I am currently using EXT3 for the simple reason of how well supported it is. Both JFS and XFS are both only in maintenance mode (bug fixes only).

On a side note I have noticed through the life of EXT3 in the 2.6 kernel that preallocation (http://lwn.net/Articles/81359/)  also dir_index has been the default for some time (when creating a new filesystem).

---

Nick

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