[plug] Linux File Systems under Woody

[Michael Hunt]

Hello pluggers,

I'm looking at rebuilding my home desktop PC as a woody box and running
test enviros under vmware for all the different OS's I play around with
as my current multi boot scenario is not efficiently utilising my disk
space. As much as I love sid, I need a stable desktop to be able to read
email, browse the web, type and print documents and do some sys admin
type work from and woody is pretty stable in this regards [1]. My
machine is grunty enough for this kind of setup and I have had
reasonable success with it in the past so I thought I would go ahead and
take the plunge. I'll just stuff around with things in the VM and if I
screw it up I just blow it away and start again.

My question relates to what file system do people think I should use for
this task. Given that the desktop PC has 120GB spread accross 2HDD I
have to make it a journal based one and I have had good experience with
ext3 in the past. But I am not sure if it is the best choice for the
large vmware files that will be created. I'm possibly leaning towards
XFS due to reports that it handles large files well, but was wondering
what other peoples opinions are on JFS, ReiserFS and AFS etc.

Unfortunately file systems comparissons seem to indicate no clear
leader, rather they say take a look at what you are going to be using it
for (i.e database server, file server etc) and choose the apropriate
file system from there. For me that's looking like XFS.  

I suppose I'm basically looking for someone to put there hand up and say
I have used XFS for blah blah blah and I have had these good/bad
experiences with it. Once I go to a VM the choice of file system is
rather academic given the 2 layer approach so my own comparisson testing
is not an option.

Anyway looking forward to hearing peoples replies.

Michael Hunt

[1] I could have chosen to install FreeBSD 5.0 with UFS2 but I thought
it was a bit bleeding edge (if there is such a thing in the BSD realm).
Also I will be inclined to play with it to much and possibly introduce
unwanted instability issues :-) !!!