[plug] JFS pros, cons?

[Denis Brown]

On Fri, 4 Apr 2003, Bernd Felsche wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 03, 2003 at 02:39:04PM +0800, Denis Brown wrote:
> > I'm going through the motions of setting up what I hope will be a
> > high availability Linux machine.   It will have a UPS, dual SCSI
> >
 
> What? You don't rsync to a warm standby host over gigabit? :-)

Would love to if I could find a generous benefactor :-)  In fact in the
long term I hope to have a couple of these boxes at separate sites and I
was thinking to link them using CODA.  Rsync sounds like a better idea.
But that is In The Future (tm)

> > For example, is anyone using JFS and have comments to make
> > regarding it?   I'm not so much fussed about data loss caused by
> 
> AFAICT, JFS is still a bit of an experiment.

Hmmm... I get that impression too.

> If you need journaling, then Reiserfs is "more proven". ext3 is nicely
> robust. Reiserfs has the performance advantage on loarge directories
> and small files. ext3 works well on large files.

One of my tasks for this server is to support databases and web-based
calendar and resource services so in the main I'm probably looking at
large-ish files from few directories.   Being able to manage the ext3 fs
with ext2 tools is probably an advantage for me, not that I've had to use
ext2 tools in anger many times -- touch wood.   Also it seems that ext3
offers data as well as metadata journalling, but I have yet to read more
on Reiser; it may well do, too.

Having to investigate the various options is rewarding in itself (for me
at least).   I can see why Reiser went for B trees and dynamic allocation.
I'd value a clarification on what you mean by Reiserfs being "more
proven."   I don't yet know enough about the history and use of ext3 and
Reiserfs to understand what you might mean.   I know that some people have
mentioned data corruption issues with laptops, when using Reiser, but an
article by Daniel Robbins (Gentoo CEO) claims that is due to lt hdd
hardware issues.
 
> It's hard to find one filesystem that fits all requirements. I've
> been looking for 20 years. :-)

Hear, hear!   Many moons ago I wrote a fs for a Z80 system, that was
collecting brain (EEG) data in great slabs.   Even though you might think
the data arrays would have a fixed size, because of the experimental
conditions, this was not always true.   In those days, every byte was
precious A$1000 for a 10 megabyte (yes, megabyte) hdd.   Many schemes
tried in an effort to find the magic bullet.   It finally came -- the
PC -- with more storage than we could dream about: 70 megabytes.   "You'd
never fill that!"

Cheers and thanks to all for replies so far.   I'm going to spend some
time in the literature but the way things are looking atm, ext3 has the
edge.

Denis