which is best ?

some say ext2 some say ext3 some say resier - seeing as i am still fairly new to linux i am wondering just which is best?

ext2 isn't journaled so I would give that a miss for a start. Between ext3 and reiser I would probably go with reiser as I find it a bit quicker.

do i need anything special installed for it to run - like diff kernel or anything?

and what command(s) do i need to know to format a drive to use resier ?

The default slack kernel as with most linux distros have reiserfs compiled in - just make sure you do the same if you recompile the kernel. To format a drive you can use mkfs:
man mkfs

thanks for your help

I think it might have been Tom's Hardware Guide that recently had an extensive comparison of file systems. The "best" really depends on your intended use of the system. For most things Ext2 was fastest, but that's because it isn't journalled. You can lost stuff in a crash and it will take forever to reboot from a crash.

Reiser was overall excellent. If you're going to be doing a lot of kernel compiling and working with large files like that, or moving entire disks of music files a lot, then XFS or JFS is faster than Reiser.

I wish I could find that article...

AHA! Found it!!!

http://209.81.41.149/~jpiszcz/index.html

HTH,
Siri Amrit

was thinking of using it for the ftp/web drive

i will have a read of that artical and decide

looks like its reiser for me atm then

how can you use xfs or jfs???
slack installation only showed me 3 options to choose. ext2 ext3 reiserfs

slack comes with a diff kernel for xfs which i think is on the install dics somewhere - also i compiled the 2.6.6 kerenl and found that it has support for those files systems already in there.

Just a quick warning regarding ext3.

Ext3 is a reliable and robust file system in most situation. But it has crashed my machine a number of times, when I copied huge files from an ext3 partition to another partition of arbitrary file system. It was even worse, when I copied huge files from somewhere else *to* ext3.

This problem was the reason that I started to experiment with file systems. I haven't really done benchmarks, because I was interested in reliability, much more than in speed; however, some file systems seem to be noticeably faster than other.

So here are my (personal!) observations:


- for small partitions, like /boot, ext3 is quite right.
- for big partitions with lots of read/write traffic on intermediately sized files ReiserFS is fast and reliable. I've never had a data loss in five years or so, apart from hardware crashes, on ReiserFS partitions.
- ReiserFS and ext3 are probably the best supported file systems in Linux. There are tools to repair corrupted file systems, and to increase or shrink file systems. While similar tools are availalbe for other file systems, some of them haven't been ported to Linux, at all, others are not as comfortable as one might hope.
- For backup partitions that you want to copy huge archive files to (using tar, eg), XFS has proved to be very reliable and fast in my environment. After reformatting my 40GB ext3 backup partion with XFS, the crashes mentioned above were gone --- even when copying from ext3 file systems to this XFS partition. I've also checked ReiserFS, but for this particular task, XFS seemed to be faster. ReiserFS used some more CPU, also.
- I haven't tried JFS myself, but in a German Linux magazine it came out as the overall winner among the most important file systems. It is apparently one of the fastest file systems in all operations, no matter if you want to do image processing or software development. So it might be worth a look.
- This said, I made these observations on a SuSE box, and it might well be different for Slackware. SuSE prefers ReiserFS, and the ext3 support is probably not regarded equally important.

My conclusion:
- XFS for writing big files, like backup partitions where you put your tar
- ext3 for /boot, and maybe smaller partitions
- ReiserFS for everything else.
- JFS might be worth a closer look.

HTH, best wishes

gargamel

I use ext2 for "/" but anything else like /var /usr /home or anyplace that files are wrttien alot I use resier FS

XFS is really the best filesystem. I have had problems with both ext2 and ext3 and i don't consider ReiserFS stable enough. I have been running XFS for years without any problem and it is really fast compared to ext3 in many situations.

Anyway, ext3 may be the best choice for a n00b. If you choose to use XFS you need to use a different kernel from the install cd. After the installation you need to either install the xfs-kernel modules from the /extra folder or compile your own XFS kernel.

Never had any problems with Ext3 but I may test out RFS in my next box. *shrug*

If you're lazy and use Partition Magic to handle your partitions then ReiserFS might give you problems... For some reason it didn't detect ReiserFS partitions correctly and so I use ext3. I haven't taken the time to thoroughly research this there might be a fix for this, or you could just take the time to learn to use one of linux's disk manager utilities.

Spasmolytic:
The reason for PM giving problems with ReiserFS is because it uses an earlier version of ReiserFS, which is not entirely compatible with the current version Slackware uses................

I use ReiserFS for my Slack filesystem, but for my backup and server, I've been using Ext3................The main reason for this is you cannot undelete files in Reiser, but you can undelete in Ext3.................for my small boot partition (I use a separate parition for /boot), I use Ext2 because it is so small and I didn't want to have any metadata from the journal taking up half the space...........I haven't investigated the other two, JFS and XFS, so I can't comment on them........