On Thu, 9 May 2002, Michael Hothorn wrote:
> I'm running woody with kernel 2.4.18 on an IBM i1200 Thinkpad. I am
> using ext2 filesystem for all partitions (but swap:-). It happend more
> than once, that I left the machine on battery and left the office for
> more than 3h ....
Ouch. :) I do kernel development occasionally which is why I ended up
looking at them.
> Has anyone a thinkpad (or any other laptop) running a journaling
> filesystem (reiserfs, xfs, ext3)? Is it safe (in the kernel
> config it's still mentioned as EXPERIMENTAL) and running stable?
Yes. ext3 is very good, though it's worth checking the changelogs for
kernels ahead of yours to see if any corner case has come up and been
fixed.
xfs is reported to be good but isn't in the core tree and isn't, as a
result, as widely tested.
Reiserfs has it's ardent supporters but, as far as I am concerned, is
not worth the bother as it *still* lacks a reliable (non-beta) fsck,
still has data-corrupting bugs this late in the piece and, since it's
almost stable, is planned to go through a complete rewrite from scratch.
> And: How to switch from ext2 to journaling? I have recent mondo/mindi
> backups of the machine. But what about booting from it with LILO?
The switch to ext3 can be done without a reboot, even, just a remount.[1]
You simply need to use tune2fs to add a journal; read the manpage.
The others would require that you reformat the partition in whatever
format you desire.
> PS This is a laptop-question; I would like to hear something about
> performance on IDE disks as well.
I have found no performance problems running ext3 in data journaling
mode; this is the least fast of the modes for most uses. This is
perfectly acceptable on my machine.
Ordered data mode is faster, if a little less safe,[2] if you really
feel the need but, frankly, laptop HDD performance sucks anyway. :)
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] Assuming that you use ext2 at the moment, of course.
[2] You can have random junk inside a file after a crash where, with
journaled data, this cannot ever happen; truncation, yes, partially
finished rewrites yes, random junk, no.
--
We went too far, we can't turn back
We built to high, we can't get down
We are the slaves of our servants
in the shadow of our ambitions
-- Covenant, _Hardware Requiem_
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