Linux File Systems

[MrOOBiLL]

What is the best file system to use with linux?

[tbirdkiri]

the one and only EXT2

[Thelemac]

I think that they all have good points for whatever use you're planning. I think that reiserfs has a journaling system or something like that...not quite sure about the benefits of ext3 as I haven't really been paying that much attention to it.

[XWRed1]

ext3 is great. I'm running ext3 and reiser on all my drives. ext3 is really nice because of its easy migration path from ext2.

[tbirdkiri]

crap so i have the fat of linux?
i want ntfs style baby where do i signup for etx3?

[David]

ext2 is ok, but I have a 20GB partition. If it crashes...
ext3 sounds good, and is backward compat.2
ReiserFS is quite good, BUT

The winner is JFS. It is a journaling FS and is a lot faster than any other FS I have used.

[tbirdkiri]

oo i was wondering if there was one...
hence jfs being the ntfs

[PolyPill]

I like to use ReiserFS, and I happen to think the Journaling file systems are the way to go, IE ext3, ReiserFS, and XFS. I choose ReiserFS because it is the easiest to install using my choice of distribution, Debian. What seems to be the fastest and most reliable is XFS, but I haven't had any luck getting it installed.

ext2 will work just fine, except it's about 8 years old. With the journaling file systems you don't have to worry about data corruption because of an inproper shutdown or something like that, plus they're faster.

I think the latest Mandrake has ReiserFS and maybe XFS as a choise during the installation, if it were me I'd pick XFS. If you do any kernel compiling you have to remember to add your file system into the kernel or else it wont boot.

Also, these are ALL journaling file systems like JFS, JFS is being developed by IBM, I haven't noticed it on any of the kernel configs or distribution installations, so I'm not sure how you would go about installing it.

If you have an installation and want to upgrade ext3 is the easiest. The others require you to either start new or back up everything to another partition/device/something format it with the new file system, then restore the data. If you have another partition and know how to work rescue disks this is quite easy. I just gzip everything (gotta tell it to preserve ownership and rights), copy it over, format, boot off a rescue disk, unzip it back, and reload your boot loader.

[XWRed1]

ext2 isn't the fat16/32 of linux.

There isn't really one.

Its just that with ext2, you have to sit through an fsck if you don't shutdown your system properly. Thats the only thing ext3 has on ext2. Its called journaling.

Reiserfs offers the same benefit, but the guy who made it mentioned a while ago that its also supposed to allow you to do ACLs like NTFS, but I haven't seen anything about that since then.

PenguinFreak: Is JFS really *that* fast?

[PolyPill]

I'm gonna give my oppinion on "PenguinFreak: Is JFS really *that* fast?"

From my experiences you're not going to get more FPS in Quake, or be able to simulate nuclear explosions faster. Only time you really notice the increase is during LARGE data moving/copying/deleting and LARGE directoy structure moving/copying/deleting. Read speed is more your drive's bandwidth/access speed. I mainly like it for my notebook comp because if my battery dies it doesn't mess up any data that's being accessed.

I also think that XFS is faster in benchmarks than JFS, but I'm not 100% sure on this.

[XWRed1]

So, it'd have minimal impact on load times and things like that, especially compared to getting a scsi drive or otherwise updating your hard drive's speed.

[PolyPill]

Yep, very little increase as an end user.

It's more for reliability.

[MrOOBiLL]

Thanks for the replies guys, can any of those FSs be read by windows 2000/XP?

[David]

Originally posted by PolyPill
I'm gonna give my oppinion on "PenguinFreak: Is JFS really *that* fast?"

From my experiences you're not going to get more FPS in Quake, or be able to simulate nuclear explosions faster. Only time you really notice the increase is during LARGE data moving/copying/deleting and LARGE directoy structure moving/copying/deleting. Read speed is more your drive's bandwidth/access speed. I mainly like it for my notebook comp because if my battery dies it doesn't mess up any data that's being accessed.

I also think that XFS is faster in benchmarks than JFS, but I'm not 100% sure on this.

It may not just be the FS. I use SuSE 7.3 and it comes with support for ext2, ext3, ReiserFS and JFS. I have a patched kernel 2.4.10

I have used ext2 and ReiserFS with SUSE7 and I can say that SuSE 7.3 will outperform 7 when I have JFS.

I'll run bonnie tonight and post the results here. If someone else with a 7200rpm ATA66 drive and a different FS could post here, we can compare.

I think ReiserFS is slower than ext2, as it uses a balanced tree or something.

[David]

Originally posted by tbirdkiri
oo i was wondering if there was one...
hence jfs being the ntfs

JFS being NTFS?

There is a difference. NTFS is *better* because it uses 512byte sectors=more efficient disk usage compared to up to 16384 for FAT32 or even more w/ FAT16.

JFS is better than ext2 because it is a journaling file system. It keeps track of (logs) every transaction eg 'file.txt moved to /root' and if it is interrupted, it only needs to check the files that were open, not the whole disk!

I have a 20G partition for Linux, it takes AGES with ext2 if Linux crashes or my little brother gets near it.

I prefer JFS to ReiserFS because it seems faster to me (it may be due to the newer kernel) and ReiserFS cannot cope with RAID arrays (which I may soon upgrade to).

[XWRed1]

Thanks for the replies guys, can any of those FSs be read by windows 2000/XP?
I saw a file system driver for using ext2 seamlessly in Win2k.

Ext3 should also be compatible with that driver.


balanced tree or something.

BTree == Binary Tree, if I remember correctly.

[David]

I have gone back to ReiserFS, I had a kinda hard reboot and I don't know what the heck was going on. I know reiser quite well. Methinks I'll stick with that.