[olug] Linux Filesystems

[Christopher Cashell]

At Thu, 20 May 04, Unidentified Flying Banana Terry, said:

I'm personally making use of XFS, JFS, ReiserFS, and ext3 right now,
across various boxes.  All partitions that were ext2, and couldn't be
easily changed to JFS, XFS, or ReiserFS, were made ext3.  All new
partitions in the past year or two have been JFS, XFS, or ReiserFS.

Here's my general opinion on them:

ext2:    Considering the advantages that the other FS's provide, there's
         really not much reason to use ext2 anymore.  Unless you have a
         specific reason to use it, I'd pass on.
ext3:    The journaling enabled variant of ext2.  It adds journaling
         capabilities, but unfortunately isn't exactly a brilliant
         performer.  If you have an existing ext2 file system, then by
         all means convert it to ext3, and go with that.  If you're
         creating a new file system from unformatted space, there are
         better alternatives.  The only other real advantage that ext3
         has is that it can also be mounted as an ext2 file system, if
         needed.
reiser:  This one is pretty well tested, and generally performs pretty
         well.  It was designed to be particularly efficient with a lot
         of small files, and it does seem to do that pretty well.
JFS:     This is also a fairly well tested file system, and tends to
         perform pretty well.  My experience with it has shown me no
         problems, nor any reason I'd offer against using it.  Among the
         journaling file systems, it seems to be the most 'general
         purpose' oriented one.  There are no particular types or sizes
         of files that it especially excels at, but there are also no
         real weaknesses to it.
XFS:     Like the others, this one has reached a point where it's a
         fairly well tested file system.  My understanding is that it was
         designed with large files and high throughput in mind, and the
         benchmarks I've seen tend to show it performing very well in
         that regard.

> http://linuxgazette.net/102/piszcz.html
> (when it's working again, appears to be broken right
> now)

You can see a better version of that from the Author's site[2].  The key
thing I came away from that benchmark study was that all of the "next
generation" Journal File systems (Reiser, JFS, and XFS) tend to perform
significantly better than ext2 or ext3, and that each has certain areas
where it performs better or worse than the others.

Depending on your specific needs, one of the three might serve you
better (although, I honestly think that most people would be just fine
with any of them).  All three have some sort of corporate sponsor
backing them, and all are being actively developed still.

 [1] http://209.81.41.149/~jpiszcz/index.html

-- 
| Christopher
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| Here I stand.  I can do no other.              |
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