Suggested Filesystem??

Sophotect · 2007-04-09 15:14:37

Hi! I came to this post after searching for filesystem performance. After reading the above posts i think i'm leaving them all at ext3 with dir_index as they are since about the beginning of 2005. Yes. Since 2005. Unchanged. Except of the continual updates by Arch and gathering of stuff in /home. Well, there is one thing which nags me. Fragmentation. For the ext3 users i suggest "davtools" to see how fragmented a given FS is. I just discoverd it's existence because of my installation slowly getting slower ;-) To solve this i'm using "defrag" and maybe try "shake". All these packages are in the AUR. Sadly i've begun to use defrag before i posted here, so no before-after results :-(

Misfit138 · 2007-04-09 17:11:37

Since I have been using Linux, I have been using reiserfs for everything. I use noatime and notail in my fstab, and performance is great. As was mentioned, benchmarks may not be the best guide, but I once read some reiserfs propaganda, and it sold me on the fs. I've been using it ever since. Reiserfs seems to work great with pacman, since it utilizes many small files.
My feeling is that since I don't do video editing or deal with large files (for which I would use Xfs) why not use the fs touted as the fastest?
Computers are slow enough as it is, why slow things down by running stock and not overclocking...or by using slower file systems?
It's 2007. PC's shouldn't have "boot times". BIOS checks should take microseconds and applications should open instantaneously; before your finger lifts off the mouse microswitch.
Hard drives are the biggest antiquated bottlenecks and pains in the neck, so use reiserfs.

STiAT · 2007-04-10 07:23:21

I'm using ext3 over all my systems. Never had any troubles, and like it. I see no reason to switch, since it just works.

F · 2007-04-10 16:25:05

ReiserFS here. Have had no trouble whatsoever with it, on my main PCs aswell as my laptop.

benplaut · 2007-04-11 06:52:36

.

Last edited by benplaut (2021-06-25 12:27:07)

lucke · 2007-04-11 07:46:00

ext3 tweaks.

Last edited by lucke (2007-04-11 07:46:24)

KerowynM · 2007-04-11 15:58:29

ext* > all

Others may be faster, but ext3 is rock solid. ROCK SOLID! If any part of my system needs to be that stable, its the filesystem. I may fool around and try to teak the tar out of most aspects of my system, but if the FS goes corrupt, what is the point?

Defragmentation of ext* partitions is simple and effective, tar -cpf /some/other/device/backup.tar, mke2fs -j /dev/hd, tar -xpf /some/other/device/backup.tar. I do it every time I make a backup of a partition.

I played with other filesystems, and data loss was horrible when the power went out. ext* partitions just keep on going and going and going....

Mr.Elendig · 2007-04-12 11:51:16

lloeki wrote:

IIRC there's benchmarking software called bonnie++ which evaluates fs performance. but remember that benchmarks just lie.
but hey, given all the horror stories about reiser4 (userland software should never ever be able to f*ck up fs, yet it does under r4, e.g with emerge/portage), given that reiser/xfs/jfs do not do full journalling (at least not by default, and I don't know if they can), given the absolute lack of ext3 horror stories, and given that ext3 performance is more than sufficient, even without tweaking, I certainly will stay with ext3 (and will take a look someday at those fs options)

ext3 dosn't do full journaling either, by default. Only metadata.

Alphalutra1 · 2007-04-12 20:23:02

UFS w/ soft deps

Actually, JFS has fit me the best so far. It is fast, never has failed me, journaled, very low CPU utilization, and it hasn't had as bad of a "grinding" issue when I run pacman.

Also, if you are considering putting it on a laptop, I would recommend JFS due to the low CPU utilization, since you will be able to crank some more life out of your battery.

XFS is what I use for my backup harddrive, since it only has large file images and I don't have to worry about a power loss and data loss since it has probably been hooked up for 3 hours total the four months I have used it...

Cheers,

Alphalutra1

belhifet · 2007-04-17 15:20:46

How can I enable full journaling on Reiser/XFS?

I'm using XFS for all (just wanted to test it).
Are there any disadvantages in using XFS?

Could someone list advantages and special features for Reiser and XFS?

Also, is there a way that I can convert a specific filesystem to another type? Like convert my current / partition from XFS to Reiser.

Btw, I'm new.
I like Arch's community .

Last edited by belhifet (2007-04-17 15:24:04)

KerowynM · 2007-05-31 17:52:14

Just an FYI, I finally got around to playing with reiser4. Lasted less than a month before I was getting kernel oops from corrupted files.

ext3 FTW, I'm pretty sure my filesystems could survive a nuclear attack

ataraxia · 2007-05-31 18:39:53

I found that XFS was really stable and has great tools, but it's slow for general-use filesystems, e.g., /var on XFS really makes pacman slow. It also uses more CPU that average (mostly in the kernel thread "pdflush").

I went back to ext3. With some tweaks applied (dir_index, larger journal, journal_data), it's fast, versatile, and even more reliable. I'm not even mounting with noatime.

Never used reiserfs, but I see the most reports of corruption with it. (For 3.6 and 4)

slackhack · 2007-05-31 18:58:47

i used to use reiserfs for just about everything --it seemed to work fine, and was very snappy. but we tend to have at least a few brief power outages per summer around here (really should get a UPS ) and one time some data got corrupted and reiserfsck couldn't fix it. since then, i've converted everything to ext3 and i don't really notice any huge speed differences. i haven't done any formal benchmarks, but subjectively the performance seems just as good. i think the tweaks someone posted on the forums helped a little too (dir_index, etc.)

Last edited by slackhack (2007-05-31 19:00:12)

Gullible Jones · 2007-05-31 20:13:14

They have different advantages...

ext3: Versatile, fast for most things, and very solid. My current FS.

XFS: Very fast, but not so great for large numbers of small files (e.g. pacman databases). With pacman 2.9.x, *had* to be used with a separate /var partition or pacman-cage, otherwise HDD would grind for several minutes whenever using pacman. Not sure about pacman 3.0.x, which seems to be much faster than the previous version. XFS employs aggressive caching, so you may lose recently "written" data during an improper shutdown.

Reiserfs: Very fast for pacman DBs and such, but seems a bit sluggish for a lot of other things, especially launching applications. The "notail" mount option is recommended, but I've actually never found it to improve performance noticably.

JFS: Used it for a while as it performed better than everything else and my HDD ran quieter with it, but performance recently seems to have been exceeded by that of ext3. At any rate, I haven't used it in a while: at a certain point it seemed to develop a sudden knack for losing data that had been long ago written to the disk, and even screw up my partition tables, following unexpected shutdowns. I have no idea how those things are even possible, but I'd be a bit cautious when using it.

Cotton · 2007-05-31 21:08:20

I've used Reiser3 successfully. It was fairly snappy but I disliked the lengthy mount times for large disks.

Tried jfs but had significant data loss following a disorderly shutdown so switched to ext3 and haven't looked back. Ext3 partitions mount virtually instantly for me on networked PCs.

Oh, and contrary to what you read everywhere, disk fragmentation does occur in Linux systems - my 160GB drive is currently reporting 35% fragmentation, probably due to it having < 1GB free at times.

dr_te_z · 2007-06-01 11:12:40

belhifet wrote:

Are there any disadvantages in using XFS?

I've read stories about conflicts MBR <-> superblock & terrible things happening when a power-failure hits your computer. May be old news and solved already, I don't know, but when you use it on separate partitions on laptop's and you are safe!

nice to read: http://www.unisys.com/products/insights … 1-6-06.pdf

Misfit138 · 2007-06-01 12:05:03

When installing Arch, how does one go about using Reiser4? I have always installed using "Reiser", which I believe is just Reiser3.....?

lucke · 2007-06-01 12:13:04

reiser4 needs a patched kernel, thus installing Arch on it might be a bit tricky.

KerowynM · 2007-06-01 14:17:56

If you want to use reiser4, what I did was install a reiser4 enabled kernel (I chose kernel26viper, I don't think mm, while supporting reiser4, has cryptcompress support. I could be wrong I didn't really poke my nose into it.) Back up my system, booted from another system (You could use a reiser4 enabled liveCD, I just booted my second arch partition) reformated the partition, and restored the backup.

Make sure you add reiser4 to the modules array in mkinitcpio.conf, and rebuild the initrd. It isn't added by the filesystem hook, or at least it wasn't before. Probably also a good idea to add it to the fallback image.

Also, you need to either add unstable to your pacman.conf, or what I did was use ABS to compile reiser4progs and its dependency (libaal I think)

I don't recommend it tho. One improper shutdown was all it took to munge it all up for me. I didn't even have a current backup, luckily it only ate my folding at home files, so while I couldn't boot because it would freak out, I was able to make a backup sans fah and recover from that.

Last edited by KerowynM (2007-06-01 14:21:37)

N1ckR · 2007-06-01 14:46:56

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.

Last edited by N1ckR (2007-06-01 14:50:52)

N1ckR · 2007-06-01 15:00:12

lucke wrote:

ext3 tweaks.

Has anyone compared the journalling options of ext3 in real world use (in my case p2p downloading causes biggest problems for me), in terms of fragmentation and human noticable performance differences ?

Another tweak to reduce fragmentaiton is ext3 block reservation (preallocation) http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/521, anyone tried that ?

If they work, might be enough to sway me to ext3 from xfs...

Cheers, Nick

ataraxia · 2007-06-01 19:12:20

I'm very happy with journal_data and a maximum-sized journal on ext3. (For the average big disk, the maximum journal size is 400 MB. I can easily spare that much space for better performance.)

Acid7711 · 2007-06-01 20:24:55

jerem wrote:

Reiserfs is really stable and has been around for a while.
You should not have any trouble with it.

Indeed. I've always only ran ReiserFS, even though I've tried them all and found what you've said to be true. For me, it's fast, it's stable, and it's never let me down.

I did try Reiser4 not long ago and loved it. I can't wait till it becomes a little more mainstream and mature.

mac57 · 2007-06-01 21:17:16

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?

By the way, I am interested in doing this because I too do not like the lengthy mount times, AND there is an installable ext2 file system for Windows XP, which I dual boot on the same machine. Hence, Windows XP would gain full read/write access to my Arch partition, giving me excellent flexibility ... unfortunately, I am still forced to use Windows for various things, so this is a real convenience.

Thanks!

Zer0 wrote:

I just recently re-installed arch to go with reiser and I can say I was not happy at all with the mount times for large drives.
Also the main developer Hans Rieser is on trial for the suspected murder of his wife. Maybe something to consider as it may
affect development of newer rieserfs's..
1) Rieser 3 doesn't update to Rieser 4..
2) ext3 will update to ext4
I switched back to ext3 with dir_index enabled.. ext3 performance wiki

ataraxia · 2007-06-01 22:17:44

mac57 wrote:

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?

You can't do it live, and in fact I don't think you can even restore a Reiser partimage onto an ext3 filesystem. You'll probably have to use tar. I did this recently to do XFS -> ext3, and it worked, with the exception that your static /dev doesn't get included, so you can't boot (!) after restoring. I solved it by booting the Arch install CD and copying its /dev (made by udev) onto my new partition. It was overkill, but it worked.

Arch Linux

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