I prefer the JFS over other file systems, just a personal preference I guess. I've noticed that my CPU is more efficient using JFS.

You'll get many different and contradicting opinions.
But why not try a few file systems yourself and see which one "feels" right for your setup?
Generally you can't convert from one fs to another, you have to backup your files to a different location and reformat to the the new fs.
It's not hard, just use the Slackware install disk to boot and do it from there.
I had used Reiser for many years with no bad experiences. But didn't have many power outages.
I've had mixed results with ext3 and have to admit I don't like ext3. It's slow.
But when I switched to XFS, I've been very impressed with it and would never go back to Reiser.
Reiser is way too cpu hungry compared to others and slow mounting.
XFS is waaaay better and so is probably JFS (haven't tried it though). Both are enterprise grade fs used on big servers.

another vote for reiserfs. it is fast, and the recovery after a crash is brilliant. was using jfs for a while under mandrake - then switched to reiserfs - seemed a bit more stable. my preference is reiserfs. if u have large files, supposedly reiserfs can end up slower than ext3 i think but most of us, especially in unix, have mostly small files, so reiserfs pulls ahead. somebody correct me if im wrong, please.

You can imagine a lot of things about a lot of other things...come on...don't be alarmist.
A man that wrote a filesystem is still a man, with its problems...is not written anywhere that a man who wrote a fs is not able to kill someone anymore!
It's quite absurd to believe that an international gang of cybers-linux-programmers-whatever tried to keep Reiser apart from the Linux community etc etc etc.
Linux and the Open Source Community has this great plus: anyone can learn from anyone...this is, I think, our strength.

Don't care about Legends.

Sorry 4 the OT ;P

I think that about fs is a matter of taste: no more.
However keep in mind this thing: the ability to mantain your created partitions and their fs.
Infact reiserfs is often much harder to resize or to move than a "classic" ext3 partition, for the simple fact that ext3 is better known to the world [and to programs]

Sounds like someone needs a good UPS.

dennisk

But then the "need" to resize a partition only indicates
poor planning to begin with ... ;} I didn't need to resize
any Reiser (or other partitions) in a VERY long time.



Cheers,
Tink

However I've seen a lot of people wasting their hds due to a partioning problems, and since we have no way to see the future, I think it's smart to have a system that can be modified whenever you "need" or, maybe, whenever you MUST =).
Regards.

Personally I like reiserfs, as it was always faster than ext3,
and could w/r data faster.

For all of you people discussing what FS is better... read this discussion with Theodore Ts'o http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Filesystems/reiserfs.html

Thanks for the link, witz. It could explain the individual file corruption I was experiencing with power outages. That thread confirms for now my opinion that, for a normal PC, ext3 is probably the best option to keep your data safe, while giving average performance. dir_index certainly helps with lots of small files. It's not as fast as reiserfs according to some tests available on the net, but the performance is at least comparable.

By the way, I read somewhere that XFS aggresively caches writes to disk, so if there's a power outage you may end up with a file system which is several minutes old. Is this true? If yes, can this be tuned?

reiserfs is NOT harder to resize, just use the command:

resize_reiserfs

But then you have never tried to resize a reiserfs partition, have you?

While the site you linked may be...informative... I must discount anything read on it on the basis that there is an obvious bias towards Reiser4 and any evidence provided is suspect. Also, the anti-Jew sentiments coupled with the conspiracy theories are somewhat offensive. If it is your site, perhaps you could delineate between the topics better.

Of course you can =D
But, as you can see in the man page, this program only changes the size of the filesystem, and not of the underlying device, this means that you have to shrink or enlarge your partition with fdisk or similar: so is not "simple" as using parted, and keep in mind also that a lot of programs for partitioning (even commercials ones), can't, in most cases, even recognize a reiserfs.
As you can see, the ability to do such a job, is not so spread as for more common filesystems: I think that you can realize that for your own.
However you are right, is not hard...but it is, for sure, harder to manipulate a reiserfs than a ext3 filesystem (just look at commercial programs [I don't like them, of course]).
I'm not against reiserfs =), at all: I think it rapresents the future of fs (altough we have to see also ext4...)

Cheers.

So whose fault is that exactly.

Parted could easily support Reiser3 and Reiser4 (and NTFS) but choose NOT to.

Wandering off-topic a bit here?

My advice would be to stick with what you've currently got if it's working alright for you now. Personally I've had trouble with Reiser 3 but not with ext3, but as has already been pointed out experiences may vary. However, for a basic home computer setup you probably won't see a great deal of difference between systems, which as far as I'm concerned means it's not worth the hassle of changing your setup. Every partition you want to change the FS type on will have to be reformatted, which is a pain, particularly for root, /usr, /var, and so on.

If you're wanting to set up a new system, it may be worth looking into different filesystems, but in that case you also ought to take into account what you want to use the system for. Different filesystems tend to have different strengths, for example some are good at handling lots of very small files, others are better for large blocks of data, and so on.

One simple thing that might give you a slight performance boost is adding the option 'noatime' to your fstab, apparently it makes quite a noticeable difference on slower drives, such as notebook drives.