[plug] Linux File Systems under Woody

[William Kenworthy]

I have a desktop with 2 ibm60G harddrives using a software raid 0 stripe
for 13 months: first Mandrake and now gentoo.  I would steer clear of
xfs as its been blamed for data loss in a number of circumstances:
gentoo used to reccomend it but had to withdraw - it appears that the
loss happens in only some circumstances, but it was common enough to
create widespread disasters. YMMV!!!

Ext2/3 is more suitable for laptops these days than desktops (no flames
please!)  Ext 3 will still do the fsck thing after some crashes, and
when booting after 25 reboots unless you tune it - and that can take a
loooong time when you need a system up fast and disks are large.  Why
laptops: you can turn the journalling off and allow disk power saving to
shut the disk down: all journalling filesystems write the journal to the
disk every few (5 secs for ext3 and reiser) seconds.

Reiser had a bad reputation in the early days but has been quite stable
for some time (a couple of years) now: e.g., I was suffering several
hard locks a day for two months (eventually had to slightly underclock
the cpu to stop them) without any problems.  In another case I had one
HD IDE cable come loose: not good when doing a raid stripe, but it
survived Ok!  It does not do an fsck at inconvenient times and always
comes up very fast, even if restoring the journal.

vmware works fine on this system, but I have only compared it with ext2,
and other than getting caught at awkward moments with ext2 and the fsck
thing, there's no difference to the user. The vmware I am currently
using created 4 2G container files rather than a single large file.

Reiserfs is very good with lots of small files, but also has no problem
with multi-gigabyte audio/video files.  I think ext2/3 is still limited
to 2g?

My reccomendation is boot on a small ext3 partition (easier to deal with
when using lilo/grub, fsck's in seconds when it happens) and raid0
stripe with reiserfs for the rest.  Put a large identical swap on each
disk and set priority to same in fstab (enables parallel swap similar to
a raid 0 stripe).

BillK

On Thu, 2003-01-30 at 01:02, Michael Hunt wrote:
> 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
>