Re: [gentoo-user] Which filesystem for a notebook?

[Billy Holmes <billy@gonoph.net>]

Richard Fish wrote:

> In the last year, I have run XFS, reiserfs v3, and ext3 on my laptop.  I 

I've ran xfs, jfs, reiserfs v3 and v4, and ext3.

jfs on a firewire drive is a bad idea. When it crashes, it crashes hard. 
No amount of recovery was helpful. In the end, a week old backup, and a 
reformat with a new filesystem got me back to production.

XFS has been very good to me. I like the performance, and power outages 
have done nothing to the integrity of the file data.

reiserfs3 is good for some things. It treats lots of small files really 
well. Large files aren't a problem either. It eats major CPU cycles 
compared to other filesystems.

reiser4 is faster when it comes to throughput, and certain non-realworld 
scenarios, such as creating tens of thousands of directories, or 
deleting millions of files. Eats CPU cycles like there is no tomorrow. 
Not a good filesystem for a highly interactive desktop. If your concern 
is throughput, and you don't need interactivity (a file server in a 
closet, enclosed in cement) then it would probably make you very happy - 
provided you don't get burned when a new kernel revision comes out that 
totally breaks it.

ext3 uses the least cpu of all the filesystems. It's not at snappy as 
xfs or reiser4, but the code base is very stable when it comes to linux. 
There are also many, many (did I mention many?) utilities, documents, 
and guru's out there that can help you rebuild your ext3 filesystem in 
case it really eats itself.

I use ext3 on an external harddrive, as I believe in the data recovery 
aspects of ext3. For my desktop machines, I use xfs. For servers, I use 
ext3 unless I really feel I need the extra performance, then I use xfs.

> I do not know of any Linux filesystem that can be resized while still 
> mounted.

$ man xfs_growfs

[snip]
xfs_growfs expands an existing XFS filesystem (see xfs(5)). The 
mountpoint argument is the pathname of the directory where the 
filesystem is mounted. The filesystem must be mounted to be grown (see 
mount(8)). The existing contents of the filesystem are undisturbed, and 
  the added space becomes available for additional file storage.
[snip]

you *must* have the filesystem mounted in order to use xfs_growfs. XFS 
lends itself VERY well to lvm2 (which also runs on all my desktops).
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