Filesystems ReiserFS - EXT3 - XFS
 

Hello,

I'am moving from windowz to Linux, now there is the question which filesystem I should use, I have used ReiserFS and Ext3 without any problems the last year. I wanted to use ReiserFS (better performance, better inode management) but there are some posts in the net saying that there are sometimes problems with ReiserFS. Does anyone have experiences with ReiserFS on SUSE 9.3 (10.0) in 64 bit version? What's about XFS ( I have never used it and my Linux bible (Kofler) does not say much about it). Any suggestions (with reasons!) are welcome.

RGummi

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Re: Filesystems ReiserFS - EXT3 - XFS
 

If you read 100 stories, there will be cases that someone has problem with any filesystem of those.
The Linux kernel team doesn't like reiserfs much.

A great number of people use reiserfs and ext3 (or jfs or xfs) without any problem.
There is a post in linuxgazette (http://linuxgazette.net/102/piszcz.html) which benchmarks these filesystems.
It is rather old so it doesn't benchmark reiser4 but you will get a rough picture.

As you will understand from the benchmarks, the picture is the following:
1) ext3
It rather quick with erasing files
It is slower than the others in general
It is compatible with ext2 (it can be mounted as ext2 without journal features of course)
Almost every linux kernel that exists somewhere has support for ext2, so in case that you have trouble and you can't boot from a cd
and you pc has exploded :) and i don't know what other possible reason, you can mount the disk very easily from anywhere
(even windows)

2) reiserfs
It doesn't have inodes/blocks and uses btrees for storage.
In other words it is very quick and storage efficient with small files
You have a 500 byte file in ext3 and it occupies 4096 bytes (a block actually but the usual size of a block is 4096)
In reiserfs you don't have that.

3) jfs
In linuxgazette's benchmarks it was very good. They classified it as "the best all-around fs"
Not many people use it.

4) xfs
xfs is great with large files.
If you have for example a usb2 disk that you have for removable storage of divx movies then you choose xfs

All of them are very mature now and you will not have any problem with any of them.
What people choose is just a personal choice.

The only thing you must consider, is that if you will use LVM, you can only grow a jfs and a xfs partition.
You can't shrink it. If you don't know what the term "LVM" is then forget i ever mentioned it.

Hello,

thanks for your answers!

I know what LVM is, but I think I can also resize (growing) ext3 and reiserfs , not?

Why does the kernel team not like reiserfs? Any really good technical reason? By the way what is with defragmentation? I know it's much better than on FAT and NTFS volumes but is it equal in all filesystems.

XFS: How handles it small files? What do you mean with large files (> 1GByte)?

At the moment I have reiserfs for the system and ext3 for data.

RGummi

reiser4 is extreemly important to Linux and is recieving lots of outside monetary support.

because it is in fact such a huge leap forward the kernel developers sometimes need to, and justifiably so, engage in important arguments about underlying design. And of course demand readability in terms of style and the like.
this is why reaiser4 started out in MM serie of kernel started from linux-2.6.8.1-mm2

unfortunately it seems Hans Reiser is a bit head strong and when dealing with the kernel hackers this aproach will get you absolutely nowhere sometimes permanently.

yes. See e2fsresize and reiserfs_resize. Also GUI partitioning programs like Mandriva's diskdrake (u can get it on the PCLinuxOS livecd) can safely resize ext2/3 and reiser.

You can grow every filesystem
The problem is with shrinking. You can shrink ext3 and reiserfs but you can't shrink jfs or xfs.
I mentioned that so that if you want to use LVM you think about this fact too before deciding.


As foo_bar_foo mentioned Hans Reiser is a bit hard to cooperate with.
Reiser4 has some features that mr. Reiser thinks provide some of the functionality of the kernel VFS and wants some parts of
it to change so that it uses the reiser4 routines.
But i was talking about reiserfs (aka version 3)
The kernel team people say that it had many problems that mr. Reiser kept saying are not problems and so some other people
implemented it.

You can see the results from the url in my previous post but generally it doesn't handle small files very good.
(When i say good i mean concerning speed)

Hello,

thanks a lot for your answers!

I think I will use reiserfs for normal data (source files, documents, jpgs ...) and XFS for video and audio data.

RGummi