On Thu, 2006-06-08 at 01:21 -0400, David R. Litwin wrote: > Hallo friendly list: > > I've decided that windows has to go and a swap has to come. So, I'm a > gonna clear the hard drive of my Toshiba satellite A70 laptop and give > myself a new start on life. Now, I've been looking about some. It > seems that ext3 or xfs are the best filesystems, with /boot being on a > seperate ext2 partition using xfs (do I need to do this?). Is this > true? Is it true of a laptop which I use for every day desktop > purposes? I hear also that xfs is a pain to deal with if the system > crashes. Is this true? How so? Finally, I've heard of zfs. Is this > worth looking in to more? > > I know that this is A: been done to death and D: really... shall we > say, open ended.... But, I should dearly like to have the lists > opinions on this.
I have had very bad luck with reiserfs v3.5/.6, I have not tried any
v4.xxx of the filesystem format.
Infact, I have completely gone away from reiser as a filesystem of
choice. And will not be *USING* any reiserfs in production, period. At
least until some proof of "losing the tree root, thereby orphaning all
leaf objects" is *NOT* possible or theoretically/statistically
impossible.
That leaves three(3) choices:
JFS, XFS, EXT3:
JFS is a very mature excellent filesystem, this
particular version in Linux comes from OS/2, where it
has been used and considered the defacto standard if you
need a file-system with journals (most OS/2 machine
nowadays are appliances, due to marginalization of
OS/2). JFS does suffer from some limitations when
dealing with certain situations on certain types of
files (thousands and thousands of small files, sometimes
exceptionally HUGE files as well). Also isn't as
flexible when dealing with ACLs.
EXT3 is a very mature and very well known set of specs.
It is the safest bet. But also arguably the slowest of
the 3. Slow is a relative term though. Slow could be
fast enough as you'll never notice. Or it could be so
bad, it makes you scream everytime you try to run
OpenOffice.org or Firefox with tons of extensions.
Really has only the stigma "EXT2 with Journals bolted
on" badmouthing and slowness to deal with. Excellent ACL
support, should you use them. Sparse Large file support
can be suspect at times, but only in very rare
circumstance.
XFS is mature, not as well documented, not as well
supported by utilities and it the "up and coming"
file-system of choice. This is SGIs implemetation of the
journaled file-system. It is exceptionally fast, light
weight with very good ACL support (treated as meta-data,
making it indexable and very fast to access). But GRUB
has a huge problem with xfs. During the placement of the
grub support files on the filesystem, it calls the
"xfs_freeze" function and potentially can cause a hard
lock of the system. There is the reason for either using
LILO as the boot manager (/me hatessss the LILO for many
reassssons) or use a small ext2/3 /boot filesystem and
partition for grub support (or reiserfs or JFS etc...).
Since I am one of the fuddites that still prefer a
separate /boot partition, this is of zero consequence to
me. In fact this is what *I DO DO* (hehehe I wrote DO
DO) for every workstation/desktop/laptop/server I setup
nowaday.
My choices are nearly always a bit on the sharp side of the edge... but
XFS has been my choice for more than 1.5 years now. I see this for the
foreseeable future as my choice and will continue until I see something
better.
--
greg, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The technology that is
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