Best FS for Slackware
 

Hi Forum,

I have seen various threads on this, googled for the Truth, but so far I have never found a decisive answer...

What FS should I use for a reliable and fast ( like in I/O ops )deployement of an OS...?

Ext2 Ext3 Ext4 XFS JFS...?

BRGDS

Alex

I think it depends on the application. One fs may be better for db workloads and others for desktop purposes. I've been running jfs for a loooonnng time now on my server (has very low I/O load) and my desktop. Seems to work pretty good.

SUN's ZFS has a very good reputation. But as you probably already know you won't find it in Linux anytime soon despite the ZFS for linux project...

Would you like to try it, go for Open Solaris or for very recently released FreeBSD 8.0

Beside that I forecast a very loooooooong thread following such a question with a _lot_of_not_so_convincing_answers_ ;)

From Chaos of Darkness let there emerge the Light of Truth... :-)

Alex

Using Ext4 here for a long time. It's fast and stable for me. No issues.

Hi,

I think a general response would be to use 'ext2/3'. But the choice of filesystem should be selected to support the needs of the system and how that system will be used.

If you keep personal opinions out of the scope then 'ext2/3' and now one should consider 'ext4' with certain installs. There's been so many benchmarks for filesystem comparison that I just rely on my on uses or needs.

:hattip:

I recommend XFS or JFS. I've never had any problems with them. I also recommend AGAINST ext4, it is dangerous by default in order to improve speed. Also check the XFS options, because some options can be dangerous. By dangerous I mean that in the case of an unexpected loss of power or crash, data may be lost.

I haven't got round to checking out all the different filesystems, so I've just used ext3 in the past, and ext4 on 13.

Ext4 is dangerous? Can you explain or at least provide a link?

I like reiser fs for the way it packs data on the drive and it is fast

ext4 is a good multipurpose choice, the other option IMHO is JFS.
Advantage of ext4: As the default FS of current Linux, it can support everything that the Linux kernel can do with an FS, such as increase or shrink and so on. As far as I can tell, it is faster than ext3, but as one poster has said, it's journaling mechanism is not the most robust instance of its kind (at least, in its default configuration; this means there's a certain risk that you lose data when your machine or hard disk crashes). But then, no other modern FS is supported better by standard Linux tools.
Advantage of JFS: Fast and lean (low footprint, fast and robust journaling).

XFS is also excellent, especially for multimedia servers. It is the best FS for the handling of large files (bigger than 100 MB, such as films and videos).

ReiserFS used to be my recommendation, but the future is uncertain...

This is what I can tell from experience. Currently I use ext4 for just about everything, and NTFS on an external USB device to share data with Windows users. No issues, so far (machine was set up about four months ago).

gargamel

Ext2 and ext3 have tried and test reputations and both served me well, though I have had cause to appreciate ext3's journalling a couple of times over the last few years and so said bye to ext2 after slackware 11.

Ext4 has been noticeably faster than ext3 and I've not had any data loss issues with it on my daily use work laptop since installing slackware 13 a few months back. Only prob I had with ext4 is that distros with grub 1.x couldn't boot if the kernel was in an ext4 fs - easy to fix by installing grub2 or lilo from slackware 13.

Is there anything out there to let you access ext4 partitions from windows? I remember that was a problem for me in the early days of ext3.

Another vote for ext4. I won't debate over its merits or problems.

Recently switched some of our JFS drives over to ext4, and am in the process of switching the rest from JFS to ext4.

Had a few drives mysteriously get corrupt super blocks while using JFS. These were drives that routinely see 130MB/s-150MB/s sustained read/write for periods of time (transferring 15-20gig's of data at a time). Strange that they are all 1TB Samsung F1 drives - yet our 500gig Samsung F1 drives are fine with JFS, though they don't see as much traffic as the 1TBs do. Formating the 1TBs to ext4, still going strong without a hiccup.

I'm sure a benchmark would prove one file system faster than the other. Can't personally say which one it is, as there is not enough of a difference for us to notice.

I wanted to trouble shoot the constant corrupt super block issue, but the JFS mailing list is dead, little to no development, jfsutils is missing many features that are in other file systems like ext3/4 and xfs. No way to repair the super block without having a dd'd backup, and debugfs is a PITA. The mailing list does have other people with the same corrupt super block issues, but they either have little or no replys.

I'm once bitten twice shy by XFS. 8 or 9 years ago XFS taught me how important backups are. They say there's two types of people - those that back up regularly and those who will. Today, XFS is far and away different from what it once was, the issues it had then are long gone. But I still grumble every time someone mentions XFS ;)

Every file system on any controller that does not employ a battery backup with a RAM cache can cause data loss in the case of an unexpected loss of power or crash. The beta-staging-prealpha ext4 had a longer cache cycle, so if you had a document opened at the time of the crash it did not sync to the drive. So instead of a corruptly written block with most likely unrecoverable data, you wouldn't have had anything written with ext4. Before this version of the prestaging module, the open sync time was even longer. This has long been fixed. With the current versions of ext4, your corrupt data will be written to the hard drive just like every other file system so you can fail at an attempt to recover it.

See:
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online...-Ext3-and-Ext4

and much more was posted on the topic a while ago here on LQ, just search for it. I don't think anything was done about it except to maybe warn users.

Either way, if you want a thoroughly tested fs, choose ext3. If you want performance and also reasonably good reliability (but not quite as extensively tested) choose XFS or JFS.