Re: [gentoo-user] Compressed Filesystem

[Marcus Wanner <marcusw@cox.net>]

On 12/29/2009 7:17 PM, Albert Hopkins wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-12-30 at 00:08 +0100, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
>    
>> just think a moment of the tons of bug fixes constantly going into
>> ext4. That
>> crap is not stable. Pre-alpha maybe.
>>      
> People say this from time to time, yet I have been running ext4 on my
> root directory of my laptop since July 2008.  The only problem I've had
> since then is one time it would not mount on boot.  I merely had to fsck
> it from a live media an then it was ok (nothing lost or currupted).  But
> that was a long time ago when it was still ext4dev.  And I've had
> numerous crashes and battery depletions on the laptop without incident.
> So the pre-alpha FUD that some people are spreading is either not true
> or I just happen to be the luckiest ext4 user in the world :-).
>    
For my two cents, a while back I was on ext4 and was trying to get xorg 
working. My problem was that the input drivers were not working (because 
they had not been recompiled after an update), so once I ran startx, no 
keyboard or mouse input was registered. This meant that every time I 
tried something which I thought would fix it, I had to hard reset the 
system and look at the logs. The only problem was that the logs had the 
wrong contents because they had been "written to" but not actually 
flushed to the disk, and it took me about 10 hard resets to figure that 
out. Even though I was running ext4, I never lost a thing (except the 
logs :p).

For the curious, I eventually got good logs by running shutdown -h 1 in 
one tty right before running startx in the other, and that shutdown the 
system correctly.

Marcus