Re: [gentoo-user] the best filesystem for server: XFS or JFS (or?)

[Florian Philipp <lists@binarywings.net>]

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Am 22.03.2011 09:13, schrieb Mr. Jarry:
> Thanks for replies. As I had expected, they brought even more
> uncertainty then I had before... :-)
> 
> ext3/4:
> I excluded them because as I understand, they do not support
> snapshots (only with lvm, which I do not use, and I've hreard
> snapshots in lvm are not very effective, or something like that).
> Next minus-point, I tried resizing of ext3/lvm once in the past
> and remember it was a real pain in a**...
> 

Neil already pointed out that resizing is plain easy. Increasing the
size online is a matter of seconds. Shrinking needs to be done offline
after an `e2fsck -f` but is no problem, either.

> reiserfs/reiser4:
> Future of these fs seems to be somehow vague, at least to me.
> And I do not know if it can handle snaphosts and resizing.
> 

Reiserfs-3 supports increasing the size but not shrinking (AFAIK).
Performance characteristics are similar to Ext3 in this regard.

> xfs & power-off:
> I have always thought, journaling is there to prevent data
> loss during unexpected power-off. And now I read I could
> loose data even with journaled fs...?
> 

Journalling is better suited for system crashes than power failures.
Things get especially ugly when you think about write caches in HDDs or
RAID controllers.

Additionally, the main purpose of journalling is to protect the file
system, not the data. Normally, journals only contain metadata changes
like space allocations to files but not the actual data written to it.
Even good old Ext3 might put random junk at the end of your files when
it is mounted with journal=writeback during a crash.

This is basically a speed/security tradeoff. When you read up about the
various journal options for Ext3, you will understand it better.

> jfs & power-off:
> the same. How is it possible, I could loose data with such
> a mature journaled filesystem during power-off?
> 
> btrfs:
> never heard of it. Is it stable enough to be used? I just
> checkt man-page of "mount", and it does not show btrfs
> as supported filesystem...
>

Wikipedia has information about it. Basically, it will be replacement of
Ext4.

Hope this helps,
Florian Philipp


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