My distro (slackware) seems to support two formats: ext3 and reiserfs (I assume version 3). From what I can determine from reading a few articles.

- Both have Journal and Metadata write mode.

ext3
- Faster to boot
- Slower to format
- Static inodes, not as good for a lot of small files.
- lower cpu utilization.

reiserfs
- Booting is several times slower than ext3
- Faster to format
- Dynamic inodes. More efficient for small files.
- Higher cpu utilization.

What I don't get is how much of a cpu utilization difference is between ext3 and Reiserfs. Various benchmark seems to indicated that it's only a couple of percent.

The reason I asked is that the machine I am installing has a very slow cpu. Lower cpu utilization would be helpful.

Paul

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How slow is your CPU. And how big is your HDD. I had a headless server running on 486 Cyrix (it's more like 386) and I had to switch to ext2 because accessing ext3 filesystem slowed etire box to crawl. If your hard disk is 20 GB or less you can opt for ext2.

Edit: You can use ext2 with bigger disks too, only recovery from crash gets painfully slow.

Not that slow. The machine is a Athlon 700 mhz with 1.5 Gb of memory. Right now it has a 40 Gb drive. In the future I may change it to a 250 Mb drive (this mean ext2 is out).

Ext2 would be faster than ext3 and reiserfs, but yes recovery would be pretty slow.