[plug] Linux File Systems under Woody

[Cameron Patrick]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 03:47:10AM +0800, William Kenworthy wrote:
| 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!!!

I got bitten a few times by XFS before moving back to ext3.  If the
machine crashes/reboots/loses power, and there was a file that is open
and being written to[1] at the time of the crash, XFS will cleverly decide,
"oh dear, the file's been corrupted, let's fill with zeroes without
telling anyone."

[1] I.e. the metadata has changed and been written to the journal but the new file
is still in the buffer cache and not written to disk yet.

| 
| 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.
| 

Ext[23] also has the advantage that you can read it in Windows with some
program I've forgotten the name of (something-or-other Explorer, had a
little penguin icon).

| 
| 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?
| 

Nope.  I think FAT32 still is, and worse, SMB doesn't like files >1GB, but
ext[23] is fine:

(erdos ~) dd if=/dev/zero of=foo bs=1M count=8192
dd: writing `foo': No space left on device
5470+0 records in
5469+0 records out
5734719488 bytes transferred in 205.055732 seconds (27966638 bytes/sec)

(That was a futile attempt to create an 8GB file when I only had 5.7GB left on
my ext3 /home partition.)

CP.