File System Question
 

Since the demise of Hans Reiser, I am wondering if Reiserfs is going to stay the default on Slackware. It has been a while since I did a full install, and can't remember if it changed or not.

Reiserfs is what I have been using, but is there another option that is faster or more reliable? I don't know too much about file systems, but hope we can open up an interesting debate. I am a home user, and I don't RAID or anything else.

At the moment ext3 is the Slackware default. I've been running that on one machine with SW 12 (a while ago) and found it too slow...
Now I use JFS and am quite happy with it. It's fast and I've had some hardware problems where JFS showed it was very reliable.

If you want supreme compatibility with userland tools, then ext3 is your best bet. Most people should probably stick with ext3. If you want increased speed, JFS and XFS are both good (I think XFS is a little better in some aspects, but they're both pretty good, and either one will offer a speed increase over ext3). See here for various benchmarking tests for the common filesystems. If you use JFS or XFS, you will probably never run into compatibility or feature problems -- but their userland tools are *technically* less featured, in case you're super-worried.

I myself prefer JFS. I have had been curious about XFS, but the aspect of a delayed write-to / arbitrary write down of information has kept me away. As far as ReiserFS is concerned, there haven't been any announcements from Pat that he will remove the FS, nor anything from kernel.org that would suggest that they would also remove it, however ReiserFS v4 is still not officially included in either Slackware or the kernel code itself, and at this point I don't think v4 will ever be included inside the kernel sources.

At this point, I don't see ReiserFS ever going away, and perhaps sooner or later the only thing that might change is the name itself, but even that remains to be seen. Also, I think even Pat uses ReiserFS for his / partition. Just read the README.initrd.

It all boils down to what you need. I use xfs on my / and /home partitions. I just find it very snappy and less prone to lag I notice with ext3. I have used JFS and find it just as snappy and uses less CPU(possibly good for laptop/older hardware). But ext3 is very very stable. I have two storage/backup drives with ext3. I use ext3 on those drives for one reason, stability. I can pretty much use ext3 in any OS(usually need to download some program but it is possible). reiserfs is fantastic with small files, and most people deal with those type of files. So that is one advantage to reiserfs. JFS and XFS only use metadata journaling so that is something to look into. As a home user you have a higher potential for blackouts/power-failure and all that kind of good stuff. So do a little research and you will find what is best for you. I say say ext3 is probably your best bet as of now, and ext4 will probably be it there after. JFS is basically no longer maintained(with the exclusion of bugfixes). XFS seems to be maintained but I am unsure of its standing. ext3 and ext4 have a good and solid backing from many companies(redhat to list one), so If I was looking for something in the long term ext3 is it for me.

This is mostly how I "feel" about filesystems currently. Other people may be able to give better insight.

Reiser's not dead yet.

XFS and JFS are better than ext3/ext4 and probably better than reiserfs in many situations, although it depends. I use JFS.

If you want some benchmarks to help you decide:
http://linuxgazette.net/122/piszcz.html
http://www.t2-project.org/zine/1/

Does it really make that much of a difference for a home machine? I've always used ext3 and haven't had any problems with it being slow or anything.

This general question (about the properties of filesystems, rather than about the status of Hans Reiser) has been asked several times before.

Be aware that in benchmarking filesystems the answer that you get is heavily dependant on what question you ask. There is not one filesystem that is universally better than the others, but there probably is a best for a particular application (but the best for your application can easily be different from the best in the benchmarking scenario and i probably can't tell you what is the best for your application without knowing lots about it).

Also note that there can, depending on workload, be substantial differences in performance depending exact selection of options and, as the options aren't directly transferrable from on fs to another, it is difficult to know what exactly constitutes a fair/level playing field test of filesystems.

You could describe this as 'horses for courses'.

I did some testing some years ago on boot up times and found Reiser to be faster than ext2, presumably due to the 'small file optimisations'. I was very surprised by this and selected Reiser as my personal default and have not had reason to change. Reiser 4 would be nice, though, as its faster although whether it will be widely available is now questionable (and was questionable, even before Hans Reiser's local difficulties). I'd guess I'm now likely to change to ext4, when that becomes stable and widely available (and assuming that Reiser goes in to 'maintenance mode' rather than 'development mode'), but I haven't yet tried that.

Very sage.

I had some awful experiences when I first tried reiser3 (many) years ago. Never touched it since, although (as with everything) it's gotten better.
I use ext? exclusively - but note my sigline; no fs can be trusted not to corrupt your data.

Currently just starting on a sojourn into OpenSolaris - ZFS being one of the major reasons.
Linus has proclaimed his fiat on that (under Linux).

Great, there's a lot of JFS user in slackware just as me

I use ext3, find it excellent whenever there is a power outage or whatever. I wouldn't worry about things like JFS or XFS, unless you are running production / commercial level servers, in which case there MAY be some reason to go with something other than ext3. I dare say, ext3 is a journalling file system of sorts, for most people it will be perfect.

I agree that I don't think Reiserfs is going away any time soon.

If you are happy with ext3 then by all means keep using it. If you don't need the journaling them ext2 would probably even be better for you.

JFS is nice for many older machines as it is conservative on CPU usage. XFS, from what I hear, does really well with large files and large file systems.

I think the older and crappier your computer is the more your filesystem DOES matter. On my old laptop using JFS makes a huge difference on CPU usage especially. JFS has very low CPU usage for file manipulation compared to other filesystems. This is very good for laptops, and especially old ones. Many say that XFS can be tweaked to be much better than pretty much any other filesystem, but it can be less reliable because of the way it extensively caches things in RAM.

You should at least try the other filesystems. I've tried ext3, reiserfs, XFS, and JFS. I've found that the benchmarks are quite accurate, XFS and JFS were noticeably faster for me. And since JFS uses less CPU time, that's the best one for me. Try them and make up your mind, don't just say "I'm sticking with ext3 cuz everyone else uses it, surely what everyone else uses must be good, kinda like Window$"

EDIT:
One more thing you might want to look into is your IO scheduler, I think IO schedulers vary somewhat in performance with respect to your filesystem and type of workload. You can try them out on-the-fly, so there's no reason not to test them and see which one is best. I would recommend testing them with multimedia or games. For example, watch a movie off your HDD, switch IO schedulers and try again. Or if you do something else more often, then do that and try out the different schedulers. I've found deadline to be the best for what I do.

I use ext3. Reiserfs could go away in the future, in my humble opinion/prediction because of two things. The first, that there is no official maintainer. Namesys does not maintaing it. They only work on reiser4. Not long ago, I think Novell was maintaining it as it was the default choice in SuSE, but they have moved to ext3 since then. Second, that, as far as I know (maybe this has changed), reiserfs depends on the big kernel lock at least for some critical parts, which prevents it from being run in more than one processor at the same time. In other words, filesystem wise, it's like you only had one CPU, and this can become a performance problem now that dual core machines, or better, are a standard choice.

By the way, anybody using ext3 should probably activate its dir_index option when creating it (this activates a tree index for directories that allows it to handle much better directories with many small files, like reiserfs does), and should probably mount it using the option "barrier=1". It's important if you want to make sure your filesystem is not corrupted on a power outage.

I saw this article just linked to on /. :
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/li...AGX59&S_CMP=GR

Will read it next. I think I am just going to stick with what I have until my next install. If it isn't broken, why fix it, right?

Someone said that there that JFS is no longer being maintained and that only bugfixes are being released. I don't know, that sounds like it is being maintained to me. I don't see any reason that JFS would need a version update, it seems to work well. I like JFS, and even on a faster machine I would use it, especially with a much bigger disk volume. I remember when I got my external HD, and I tried out ext2/3 and reiserfs. They were all horrible as far as I was concerned. The ext* filesystems allocated too much space to itself, like 6% out of my 250GB, and that to me was unacceptable. I don't know how reiserv4 handles large volumes, but I remember after formatting it to reiser(v3), it took a VERY VERY long time just to mount, at least a 2+ minutes, I'm not joking!! I then thought about trying XFS, but it's unreliability one when it actually writes information down vs just issuing it a copy command and hoping it would sync, plus certain issues of a crash drove me away from XFS, then I realized JFS, since I was already using it on my desktop, tried it, and worked like a charm.

Reiserfs v4 is effectively dead, it has been out a number of years, and still not in the kernel, so at this point, forget it! According to that ibm link, and even reiserfs v3 has fewer and fewer chances of released bugfixes over time. I think the name itself will probably go away, and probably when that happens more work might be done with the ex-reiserfs (insert_new_fs_name_here).

I am still curious about when ext4 comes out, but I think I have found my all purpose FS, (J)FS. :D

Still in development would have been a better term.

Err, but one of the reasons that Reiser 4 hasn't made it to the kernel is that in any negotiations with the kernel guys, Hans Reiser's rather abrasive attitude didn't help. And, at least temporarily, that part of the problem has gone away...

And anyway, for probably 18 months or more, it has been available in Xandros desktop 4. Not sure if that was buggy (didn't do any long term evaluation) but Xandros did seem one of the snappier distros.

Thats just Xandros, and it was not just Reiser's attitude that prevented v4 to be included, there were technical reasons why it wasn't included either. http://wiki.kernelnewbies.org/WhyReiser4IsNotIn

I concur. I've been running the JFS on Slackware 12.1 on my two old crappy machines, a Plll 667 IBM, and an 850 Celeron IBM. I've noticed real gains in CPU usage with the JFS. I'm happy that I switched from ext3. For newer machines it may not matter, but, for these old beasts I need every optimization that I can get. JFS for me:-)

Well, I know I'm repeating myself but, I like JFS on my old system, and would still use it on a more modern system as well. :p

Agreed. I would eventually like to buy a newer, faster Slackware box, but, I see no reason to switch file systems:)
JFS works well for me.

The experience I had with ext3 was on a P4 (3Ghz, 1024 MB RAM -not really old/crappy) and I found it noticeably slower.

Was going to try these, but my desire to try JFS got the best of me:
http://en.opensuse.org/Speeding_up_Ext3

JFS mounts faster, runs on less CPU and has decent I/O speed compared to:
reiser
ext3
ext2
and does recover from dirty unmount in sub seconds on both PII and newer boxen
to my honest surprise !

My wote is for good ol' JFS(2)

;-)

Of course now the inode 256 byte change in ext3 has broken compatibility with some Windows fs programs, so if cross-system compatibility is an important reason to stay with ext3 you'de better not use the new version in slack 12.1

Can't you just change the inode size during the installation? The 256 byte inode size is now the default, but I'm pretty sure (though not positive since I haven't installed fresh for a while) that you can just select 128 bytes as an option during installation.

[edit]Well, after trying it out in a VM, it looks like you can't change the inode size from within the setup script -- you would have to hack the mke2fs line in /usr/lib/setup/SeTpartitions on the install CD. Something like the following would do (I think):
I seem to remember being able to select that in Slackware 11.0, but I could be (and probably am) incorrect.[/edit]

I didn't know Window$ actually had ext2 support. But you know that usb flash drives are usually used for say taking one to the library, putting all your research materials on there, and then taking it home, or for going to a friend's house and getting some goods from them. Most of the time I don't even use usb flash drives, in the library case I would just upload them to gmail. In the latter, I'd tell him to up it to a file sharing site. Of course there are other uses for usb flash drives, but typically they should remain formatted with something universally compatible, otherwise it defeats the purpose, IMO.

ext2/3 support windows 256 byte inodes
 

You can certainly change the inodes back for compatibility by setting up the filesystems prior to running setup. It's just that if you run the defaults and pick ext3 because of some of the reasons given above (compatibility) you'd better think ahead and do that since the setup script doesn't give you a choice or a "heads up".

Windows doesn't have ext2 support. However there are a number of free utilities available to give it access. For example, Ext2fs automounts ext2 filesystems and gives them a drive letter, just like diskmgmt.msc does for NTFS volumes. It doesn't do 256 byte inodes. Backup programs like Acronis MaxBlast or TrueImage support Ext3 and Ext2 fs natively (and I think some of the others too) but 256 byte inodes force it to copy sector-by sector (very wasteful of time and space). But I agree that for USB key drives something like fat16/32 is probably better for the widest possible compatibility, if that's what you want.

Personally, I like to keep Windows out of my Linux file systems. I'd rather just share NTFS or FAT partitions. You can use permission inheritance in NTFS to keep it sane on the Windows side of things.

Yes my children it can be done :D
 

It has even ReiserFS support
lol
:D
followup:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=380966