Arch Linux

itscience

Member

From: UK Lancashire

Registered: 2015-05-10

Posts: 32

[SOLVED] ext3 advantages in /boot partition?

Just a very simple question I was curious about.
I was reading this article on the redhat site..
https://access.redhat.com/documentation … d-x86.html
Somewhere at the bottom they show the example of the boot partition and they use ext3 and use ext4 for the rest.
The article has no post date but I am assuming it is not too old, at least.

I went on the internet looking 'ext3 VS ext4' and it says a lot but nothing about why you would choose ext3 on /boot.
Tutorial on how to install Arch Linux on Youtube sometimes use ext3 but they sometimes state ext4 is unstable and the videos are a little old.

Would anybody be able to solve this mystery?
Thanks for reading :-)

Last edited by itscience (2015-11-09 22:30:59)

jasonwryan

Anarchist

From: .nz

Registered: 2009-05-09

Posts: 30,424

Website

Re: [SOLVED] ext3 advantages in /boot partition?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Filesystems

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Arch + dwm   •   Mercurial repos  •   Surfraw

Registered Linux User #482438

olive

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2008-06-22

Posts: 1,490

Re: [SOLVED] ext3 advantages in /boot partition?

The files on the boot partition must be accessible by the boot loader. So complicated filesystems like btrfs or reiserfs can pose problems with some bootloaders. But all bootloaders I know supports ext4 quite well, so I think there are no advantages to use ext3. I don't believe there are stability problems, maybe some years ago, but not now anymore.

Note that for UEFI system, the firmware only knows vfat natively. So in this case and depending of your bootloader, it might be better to use vfat for the /boot partition; which might be the same as the EFI partition.

Last edited by olive (2015-11-09 21:11:22)

itscience

Member

From: UK Lancashire

Registered: 2015-05-10

Posts: 32

Re: [SOLVED] ext3 advantages in /boot partition?

jasonwryan, thank you for the link and thank you olive for explaining that :-)
I'm just trying to learn what I can and play about, in trying to find the best way to maintain my computer. I like the look of F2FS for SSD. Hopefully I can get that, successfully.