[tech] A question of File System

Ian McKellar ian at mckellar.org
Tue Apr 23 01:29:14 WST 2002


On Sun, 2002-04-21 at 07:16, David Luyer wrote:
> > The question I have now been asking myself, while having the occasionaly
> > random argument with others; is which file system is better: ext3 or
> > ReiserFS
> 
> Fast for writes... reiserfs if you have small files which grow, ext2 and
> ext3 are also pretty fast with a small number of files per directory.
> 
The big advantage of ext3 over reiserfs is that its just ext2 +
journalling so its a known quantity. The big disadvantage of ext3 vs
reiserfs is that its just ext2 + journalling so its slow. Reiserfs also
has (at least it will have) some kind of extended attributes system. I
don't know if/when that'll actually be used in userland.

Oh, and Oracle have ported their cluster filesystem to linux. Nice
journalled filesystem that can be used by multiple machines at once over
fiber-channel. Pretty darn cool - and faster than ext2 even though its
essentially a network filesystem.
> 
> And if you want pretty pink flowers, well, I'm sure Apple will have
> a filesystem with them soon... in five fruity flavours.

Dom (ex-Be guy who wrote BFS) is working on a new FS at apple. That
should kick ass. BFS had all sorts of really nice things like
journalling and indexed file attributes. If Apple let him implement that
kind of thing it'll be great. The lack of attributes and the lack of
automatic metadata indexing on unix filesystems sucks. If OS X got that
it just might make me give up OS 9.

While we're talking about journalling its pretty funny when the ops guys
here have to drive over to the colo to fsck a machine that went down.
*sigh* Solaris and BSD - why would anyone run these in production? ;-)
> 
> > Of course, feel free to suggest a better filesystem still (noone may
> > suggest NTFS or FAT*)
> 
> Why - you assume Microsoft couldn't make a good fs?  NTFS is actually a
> decent fs.

Because bigotry is cool and closing ones eyes is the best way to learn
new things.

Ian

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