Re: Journaling Filesystems (Re: tlug: Ext3)

[Austin Kurahone <austin@example.com>]

Oliver wrote:
>If you need journaling, use ReiserFS, is is not only more stable, but
>is also as fast or sometimes even faster then ext2. The problem is that
>you can't boot from it, so you'll need a separate /boot partition.
>The only place you want to use ext3 is, for a pretty limited / which
>is not offen written to or a fairly static data partition (like MP3s)
>for which you don't have the extra space to switch from ext2 to ReiserFS.
>The only advantage ext3 offers is not to need to reformat.
>If anybody need's an ext3 patch for 2.2.14, mine can be found at
>http://www.sukisuki.org/linux/ I really hope it's seemingly stopped
>development gets moving again real soon.

Hmm, pray tell does ReiserFS offer a SGI KDB module for debugging *grin* (Don't know about all of you guys out there, but for me this is real important).  Seriously though Stephen (The ext3 guy) wrote a while back that the framework for metadata only journaling was in palce and all it needed was some testing (IIRC).  not that I have any problems with ReiserFS or anything (they'd better fix the incompatibilities with devfs though!!! Now that it made the official kernel *mumble* *grumble*).  The current method of ext3 journaling should be safer than ReiserFS's since it does full journaling (IIRC, there was soemthing in the ReiserFS documentation about what would happen if your box crashed durring a kernel recompile, describing that you'd have a bunch of corrupt .o files but the filesystem was safe).

On a slightly offtopic note:
(Quoting from http://www.netbsd.org/Misc/features.html)
lfs (Log-structured File System) - lfs is designed to allow safe asynchronous file creation, fast file writes without intervening head seek and near-instantaneous crash recovery. This is a more completely log structured form of 'Journaled' filesystems such as IRIX's XFS, Reiserfs, Microsoft's NTFS, IBM's JFS, and similar filesystems in Netware and Unixware. (More details). 

Hey if McKisick et al had a hand in the design process it must be good ;-)

*grin* And hey NETBSD-current now has SMP support...(If I only had the bandwith to get it).[*1]

-- 
Austin K. Kurahone
Tokyo Linux Users Group / Green Frog Linux Maintainer
"What is the ape to man?  A laughing-stock, a thing of shame.  And just the
same shall man be to the Superman:  a laughing-stock, a thing of shame."

[*1]:*gasp* he said BSD!?!?!? *shock* *horror* ;-)  Actually, I've come to like BSD a lot more lately, not just out of nostalgia (my first U*IX that I got to tinker with heavily) (I've been tinkering with the codebase and poring some userspace tools that I like (eg: ls (Hey BSD ls adds the -a flag by default when root and is far less bloated that FSF ls)).  If anyone wants the patches or a tarball throw me a line. (I'm currently finishing off BSD-fileutils, all I need to do is to rewrite df to use glibc filesystem code, all other utilities found in FSF fileutils are done)
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