[plug] Journalling FS Benchmarks

[Cameron Patrick]

Bernard Blackham wrote:

| > It seems JFS, XFS, & Reiser are all fairly similar, and better than Ext3. 
| > Anyone have any personal recommendations? What about other features, like 
| > stability, recoverability, undeleting deleted files, etc?

Re. undeleting files:  I don't think that any fs supported by Linux
(other than FAT or ext2) has an 'undelete' mechanism.

| In my experience, ext2/3 still seem to be rock solid in terms of
| stability, resiliance, and ability to recover from corruption.

ext3 makes stronger guarantees about the consistency of data written
to disc than the other journaling FSes - not only does it ensure that
file metadata is correct, but also ensures that in the event of a
crash, a partially-written file will never data that actually belongs
to some other file.  (And it does this without replacing the whole
bleeding file with 0's when remounting, like XFS does.)

http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/FAQs/ext3-faq.html

| I've heard many horror stories of Reiser filesystems vanishing,

Likewise, though I've been brave enough to use reiserfs on a few
machines and *touch wood* nothing bad has happened yet.

| and seen XFS filesystems zero out files.

Hey, that's my line ;-)

| The XFS kernel code I've also seen panic machines (I don't believe a
| corrupt filesystem should panic a machine).

One failure mode of XFS also involves making an file system
unmountable after a crash or power failure, which shouldn't
happen with a journaling FS.

Cheers,

Cameron.