[tech] A question of File System

David Manchester mustang at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au
Tue Apr 23 12:43:47 WST 2002


On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 10:29:14AM -0700, Ian McKellar wrote:
> 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.

Its nice to see some parts of Digital Unix will live on...

> > 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? ;-)

Its even funnier that they're not running journalled filesystems.
WTF aren't they running Solaris 7/8 with UFS/journalling ?

> > 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.

Got a linux kernel booting on the danger yet? ;)

D.
-- 
" I don't get mad.... I get stabby. "
- William "Fat Tony" Williams.


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