@Martinus2u: Quite conservative are we But you're not considering all the factors. Well that's your perception anyway

Well since a new machine is going online I think I'll test ext4 with it while keeping an additional ext3 filesystem mirror unmounted with the most important data. I'll revisit the issue when the next stable release comes out. Maybe at that point something more "exotic" life xfs or btrfs will have reached a level I'm comfortable with. What can I say, I'm open to change, but only if there is a compelling reason.... </pick up cane and hobble away>

If you go the multi-partition scheme, use EXT4 for booting and try out BtrFS for your main local file storage. BtrFS is very similar to BSD/Solaris's ZFS file system. Both are very comprehensive systems and support many features to prevent and control data loss and corruption. Currently I've been using this scheme for my system at home:

/boot - ext4
/(root) - btrfs

I used ReiserFS in the past also and it's a fairly stable file system and does well against data corruption and loss. here's a good run down of ZFS vs BtrFS: http://www.seedsofgenius.net/uncateg...fs-a-reference

The only thing about ReiserFS is it's showing it's age and little to no work has been put into Reiser4 since Hans was sent to prison for murder.

XFS is not exotic. It's been around for a long time and I find it very reliable and well performing. I've been using only XFS (even for my external usb drives) for many years and never had a problem. It's also known to work well in raid configurations which I'm also very fond of and would never have my data on anything other than at least raid 1 and last about 4 years it's been on raid 5 (Linux software raid) and I've had zero problems, been running without a glitch all those years.

Guys, isn't XFS only best for servers, or at least those configured to run with many many disk-hogging threads with many many opened small to large files. How about just for average user desktop/mobile system? I've seen some comparisons and Ext4 seems more preferrable.

Oh yeah, and we know that both filesystems can be configured, but let's try to give an average viewpoint for both sides.

My conservative mostly-redhat-using circle of friends tend to prefer XFS, while my wild and wooly live-on-the-bleeding-edge circle of friends tend to prefer ext4. I discovered XFS's excellent scalability while doing data mining work in 2005, and have been using it ever since. If you ever need to put hundreds of thousands of files into a single directory, for instance, you'll find that XFS's performance will degrade gracefully, while other filesystems may choke and exhibit weird problems (and ext2 and ext3 will outright refuse to put/create more than 32K files into any given directory, unless your ext3 has the htree patches).

Additionally, XFS shows great resilience in the face of unclean unmounts (power cycles, yanked-out cables, whatever -- it has no lost+found subdirectory because it does not need one), and provides a great many handy administrative tools (xfs_admin xfs_bmap xfs_check xfs_copy xfs_db xfs_estimate xfs_freeze xfs_fsr xfs_growfs xfs_info xfs_io xfs_logprint xfs_mdrestore xfs_metadump xfs_mkfile xfs_ncheck xfs_quota xfs_rtcp xfsdump xfsinvutil xfsrestore).

On the other hand, XFS may be winding down. The project hasn't many developers, and Chinner had to pull some herculean feats ("delayed logging") to get XFS's metadata performance on par with ext4's. So, even though I have four machines running entirely on XFS right now, the last time I upgraded my desktop's hard drive I formatted it ext4. I should learn its personality quirks so that if XFS takes a turn for the worse, I'll have some notion of what I'm doing with ext4.

Btrfs may be "the future of Linux filesystems", but it's not ready for real-life use yet. Give it a couple more years to cook and debug. Beware young software projects, for they are prone to problems. Entrust your precious data to a mature filesystem technology.

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@ttk: I did know tha XFS was trying to improve itself again but I didn't know much of the details. I just read some comments about it that gave views in which I find uncertain. Well said about everything

If Ext4 wasn't there I'd play around with BTRFS. But the last time I heard that it is still slower compared to Ext4, I just chose to wait until it becomes stable and see if it would be better.

I've been using JFS for a long time. No losses. AFAIK Slackware is the only distro that offers it as an option. I've really have not notice a great speed difference between ext3, ext4 and JFS. I've used JFS on my desktop, laptop and server. It works fine for what I do.

-JJ

I went ahead and decided to check the xfs filesystem out. I'm having several "Oh wow" moments, because hardware wise I now have two virtually identical machines: same i7-920 processor, same amount of memory, and same video card, but this one is running a clean install of 14 rc4 64 bit with xfs where the other was running a 13.37->14 rc3 32 bit with ext3. I'm not sure where all of the improvements are coming from, I just know that for now there is a very noticeable increase that I don't think can be strictly attributed to the architecture difference or the filesystem. When I do the two clean installs I guess I'll have a better chance to judge real differences. Either way this is the fastest Slackware install I've ever played with!

You've all got me interested now..

I have never given much thought to file systems. I always just use ext3/4 as that's what's offered as default in every Linux install I've ever done..

I've got a 3 day old laptop which I've just installed Slackware 14 on. It's got an 128 gig SSD, and I've used ext4 with the following options.
Reading about how "ext4 is only a stop-gap on the way to btrfs" is a little disheartening. Does xfs provide any tangible advantages for normal desktop/laptop use? Is it suitable for SSD disks? Does it have TRIM support (which I understand is important)..

So they say, but seeing the benchmarks, it didn't mean anything to me already

Here a benchmark from 2006, bit outdated but still one good benchmark to take a look: Filesystems (ext3, reiser, xfs, jfs) comparison on Debian Etch
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/388

Regards

Here's something that includes Ext4:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...em=linux_34_fs
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...xt4_benchmarks

What you say is interesting about XFS being updated in the kernel v3.x.xx.
Because it used to be unbearably slow at massive delete operations. see here.

Also XFS seems like a bad choice for laptops due to its delayed write operations (i actuall have lost data due to battery going out).

Are these things fixed now?

Xfs.org has status updates for development.