[plug] Linux File Systems under Woody

[Richard Meyer]

----- Forwarded by Richard Meyer/Australia/Contr/IBM on 30/01/2003 12:02 PM
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                      Cameron Patrick                                                                                                 
                      <cameron at patrick.wa        To:       plug at plug.linux.org.au                                                     
                      ttle.id.au>                cc:                                                                                  
                                                 Subject:  Re: [plug] Linux File Systems under Woody                                  
                      30/01/2003 11:27 AM                                                                                             
                      Please respond to                                                                                               
                      plug                                                                                                            
                                                                                                                                      
                                                                                                                                      



>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.

I also had a funny with XFS. Had to press the reset button, and when the
machine came up again the XFS file system was unreadable. Fortunately there
wasn't much on it, so a reformat to Reiser solved that.


|
>| 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:

Reiser seems to have this limitation still. I used dd to write huge files
to a 10GB filesystem, and it craoked after 2GB. Had to run the job in
steps. (dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/S390/file1)

RichardM