On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, Philipp Zabel wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> It seems that ReiserFS and XFS are both relatively stable now and
> not too hard to install cleanly.
>
XFS has been stable (on IRIX machines) since about 1994. ReiserFS is
really only a year or two old. So far all the stories I have heard about
it involve lots of data corruption. Not really very nice :)
Also another thing to bear in mind is that ReiserFS only journals metadata
(if I remember correctly) so data corruption is still possible anyway,
its only a half way mark.
Another thing to notice is the number of updates that are made on each
kernel revision, if I remember data corruption was only stopped at 2.4.3,
we are only at 2.4.6, how valable is your data?
> Is there a place where journaling fs are compared, or are there any
> reasons why I should or should not use rfs/xfs/jfs on a notebook?
>
As you may of guessed I'm biased towards XFS, mainly because I installed
it last week on my laptop and everything has been fine (except for a few
files I buggered up, as a word of warning do not use 'dump' and 'restore'
they mangled quite a few files! However I think the XFS version
'xfsdump' and 'xfsrestore' were fine). Performance is fantastic, I get
nearly raw data reading/writing speeds off the harddisk now, things run
really quickly :) Even Mozilla (0.9.2) loads much more quickly. :)
I know very little about jfs, however a feature of ReiserFS which is
*very* bad for laptops is that it is impossible to get the harddisk to
spin down, this is because ReiserFS works at a lower level than noflushd
can capture and so your harddisk will constantly stay spun up.
XFS however, with and without noflushd, will let the harddisk spin down
after a minute and it usually stays that way :)
As for a web article Slashdot (www.slashdot.org) ran an article a couple
of weeks back. It wasn't a proper benchmark however it gave you an idea
of performace between xfs/reiser/jfs/ext2/fat32. XFS came out the best in
all the tests except for massive file deletion. Not really a problem.
One thing in ReiserFS's favour is that it is good on disk space, I'm not
sure how good but figures up to about 10% saving have been quoted, this
however I don't believe.
I managed to convert my laptop to XFS in about 6 hours. There was no
usable free space on my 2Gb harddisk so I had to copy across a 10Mbps
network to a desktop machine. Everything went fine and all the remains is
/ to be done, however I don't see much point in doing it so I probably
won't bother. Also it allows me to use the normal debian boot disks
without having to find specially made disk images.
I would go with XFS, mainly for the speed and more importantly the disk
spin down. I can only speak for ReiserFS and XFS, however JFS you will
have to work out yourself :)
if you need any advice on how best to do ext2->xfs do ask me. There is
good HOWTO at http://www.gargoylecc.com/Linux+XFS-HOWTO.html
One or two other minor issues. NFS and LVM support is fine under XFS (and
probably JFS too) however ReiserFS bombed out in a nasty way.
If you want to talk to me more about this then do e-mail me, happy
choosing
Alex
PS. pick XFS :)
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