linux file systems?

boredguyatcomp

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 9, 2005
Messages
448
which is the better file system of these 4 and why?
1.ext3.
2.ReiserFS.
3.XFS.
4.JFS (arnt they all journalised file systems?)

it also has an option for fat32 which i doubt would be the best way to go.

please help i cant decide which is best.
 
Application and storage capacity?
I use EXT3 for all filesystems under 300GB, everything over that gets XFS.
 
^ yep those are good points.

Basically, XFS offers by far the best all-around feature set and is the fastest (especially when dealing with large volumes or lots of files). It is the most expandable and it just an awesome file system. On the down side it is supposedly not as resiliant as other file systems (though I've never had an XFS volume go corrupt or had any issues of the sort) due to the way it aggressivley caches data. I like XFS for desktops and servers.

JFS is great where cpu load is the key concern. However, JFS performs exceptionally poorly when dealing with large volumes or lots of files. I like using JFS on laptops, where cpu loading is crucial and hard drives are small.

ReiserFS is kinda zany...it's performance is all over the place. It is insanely fast in some benches, slow in others. It seems to have the highest *theoritical* performance out of all the file systems but in practice it's all over the place. Reiser needs to mature a bit more, I think, before I'd give it first choice as a filesystem.

ext3 is the old workhorse linux file system. Even today it is a great choice...all around it is a solid filesystem, and is very resiliant. If you don't know what else to do you can't go wrong with ext3. Plus ext3 can be very useful because it can be read and written to perfectly fine from windows using some third-party filesystem drivers, so ext3 is great if you want to dual boot.
 
Reiserfs is terrible! I've had nothing but trouble with it: Filesystem corruption twice on two physical drives.

Ext2 and ext3 have been rock solid.
 
Out of those I've only ever used ReiserFS. I got sick of dealing with ext2 many years ago and ReiserFS was just starting to level out as an alternative. I haven't considered switching to anything else since.

From my own experience it's really quick at retrieval and can sometimes be quite slow during many rapid stores. That's the way it should be. Spend the time organizing so that when dire situations arise you've got it sorted out easily.

It's so reliable infact that I've managed to restore old dereferenced data by accident.
 
It's somewhat hard to determine which is the best. Each really has it's pros and cons. I personally use ext3 as it's supported by the CentOS installer.
 
I use XFS for my desktop, with an ext3 boot partition of 100MB (XFS does not work with grub last I heard).

On my laptop I use ext3, as I had heard about XFS having some corruption problems on laptops....I don't kow if that is still true though.

I used to use resierfs 3.6, It had pretty good performance, but the mount times were really long, it probably doubled my boot time using reiserfs. Since I don't leave my computer on 24/7, it got pretty freaking annoying and is what made me switch to XFS.

I am very happy with XFS, and since I have a dual-core that is pretty powerful, I don't care about its CPU usage much.

They are all journaling filesystems yes, but they do things differently. Ext3 has three journaling options I believe, journal metadata, journal data and metadata, and something else. ReiserFS only journals metadata I think. I don't know much on how XFS or JFS work..
 
XFS is a very well-rounded filesystem. Even the FreeBSD's guys love it, the only FS they'd have instead of UFS2.

ReiseFS I want to see dead. The problem is that the performance characteristic is entirely different than other FSes. Namely, using lots of small files is much faster. This leads developer to develop applications using lots of small files, which is braindead to boot and makes those applications run slow on all other FSes or OSes.

ext3fs has the advantage of being simpler, in particular you can read it from other OSes and older Linuxes understand it. I don't think it has many technical advantages, and the fact that it won't fragment the last block in a file means space wastage.

I never tried LFS. I don't even know whether it is a pure log-structures filesystem. The others are just non-LFSes with an added log. But the log is resolved into a non-log filesystem structure. A pure log-structured filesystem with nothing but a log is extremely hard to get right for big varieties of usage patterns and performance.
 
6 in one hand, half dozen the other.

I use ReiserFS because I can shrink partitions if I need to. XFS is decent, but its partitions cannot be shrunk, only grown, and it has some issues with Grub.
 
I'd just go with whatever the default for your distro is - unless you're putting some extreme load on the the system, you're not likely to really notice the differences. You can't really go wrong with Reiser or Ext3 - they're 'standard', widely supported filesystems. The others are somewhat more 'exotic' and still relatively new to the Linux world.
 
ok thanks guys for the input! seems from what ive read other places and here XFS is the best for me so thats what i went with. thanks for all the replies.
 
Geshtar said:
I use XFS for my desktop, with an ext3 boot partition of 100MB (XFS does not work with grub last I heard).

On my laptop I use ext3, as I had heard about XFS having some corruption problems on laptops....I don't kow if that is still true though.

I used to use resierfs 3.6, It had pretty good performance, but the mount times were really long, it probably doubled my boot time using reiserfs. Since I don't leave my computer on 24/7, it got pretty freaking annoying and is what made me switch to XFS.

I am very happy with XFS, and since I have a dual-core that is pretty powerful, I don't care about its CPU usage much.

They are all journaling filesystems yes, but they do things differently. Ext3 has three journaling options I believe, journal metadata, journal data and metadata, and something else. ReiserFS only journals metadata I think. I don't know much on how XFS or JFS work..

Well said Geshtar. I asked a friend the other night which he uses and he replied with XFS for the same reasons you explained. Quick, and dual core just annihilates the resource requirements. Especially handly if you're using quick disk interfaces.
 
Tekara said:
Reiser4 is actually showing to be a dog. . . and unstable at that, i wouldn't touch it right now as it's going through a horrible teething phase. It has an incredible amount of potential as it corrects the shortcommings in 3.6, but right now it's slow and unreliable.

Man, I have heard them say that all the probems are fixed "in this release" or "in the next release" for what, 10 years now? Do you realize they give the same speech every time?
 
I've had buggy problems with reiser, so I avoid it now like the plague. xfs is decent, but lacks the ability to shrink a fs ( although it should be noted it can be expanded ). ext3 filesystems can be shrunk and enlarged, albeit offline for the shrinking.

In a business enviroment, I use ext3 with LVM, as I never know what my needs will be next week. I may have a partition that is only using 100 megs of the 100 gigs I assigned to it, but another that needs another 50 gigs. In this situation, I'd take both offline, shrink the first. Resize the lvm partitions, then enlarge the other to match.

With xfs, I'd have to copy the data, destroy the first partition. Then resize the volume ( lvm ), reformat, put the data back, then enlarge the second.
 
just be careful about putting it on your boot drive / partition. XFS and Grub have had issues with each other in the past, they may have fixed that now though, you should check.

boredguyatcomp said:
ok thanks guys for the input! seems from what ive read other places and here XFS is the best for me so thats what i went with. thanks for all the replies.
 
I used and loved the speed I was getting from XFS for a few months, then one day I got errors about the "magic number". None of the xfstools could fix it. I'm back to good old fashioned etx3 all around.
 
Tekara said:
I'd just stick with ext2 on the boot partition, you really shouldn't be needing journaling on that partition and ext2 is a workhorse.

Ext2fs is actually a fundamentally unsafe filesystem in combination with the Linux kernel's choise to run it with asynchronous metadata.

Ext3fs addresses that problem.

Unless the partition is readonly ext3fs is the safer choice.
 
Whatsisname said:
just be careful about putting it on your boot drive / partition. XFS and Grub have had issues with each other in the past, they may have fixed that now though, you should check.

i dont think that will be a problem because i use lilo, thanks for the info though.
 
I always use ext2 for my boot partition...not really for any particular reason, though. Just habit I guess. Besides, for a tiny (~20MB in my case) partition the differences in filesystems aren't going to matter.
 
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