NOTE: This website is deprecated. All the same blogs + comments are now available at http://blog.quaddmg.com. You can go to the same article by going to http://blog.quaddmg.com/articles/YYYY/MM/DD/article-name

3/13/2005

Experiment... failed

3/13/2005 02:28:00 pm
OK, as you know I switched my /home partition to reiser4 a while ago. I've since switched it to XFS. The reason isn't that reiser4 itself is bad, it's that the -mm kernel series always has something annoying about it. I was hoping reiser4 would get accepted into the main branch pretty quick, but that hasn't happened. I've also heard there are some issues with it, so it may be a while before it does get into the main branch. So I've decided to switch back to the main branch, and my partition to XFS, which is pretty much as good as reiser4.

Actually, XFS is a pretty damn good system. I'd use it over any other fs (other than maybe JFS, and of course reiser4). If XFS works out OK in my /home partition, I'll migrate my whole system over to it.

Also, unlike last time, the change seemed to go pretty smoothly. I didn't lose data, at least.
 Comments (4)
# 3/13/2005 06:33:00 pm
Blogger Unknown
What I've heard about XFS (that's the one from SGI right?) is that it's extremely fast, but you need a very stable system to use it, i.e. on that's running off a UPS... I don't know how well it recovers from bad crashes, not too well I think it's supposed to be fast because it keeps a lot of things in RAM. But you have backups now don't you?....
 
# 3/14/2005 09:20:00 pm
Blogger Foobear
Yeah I know. It uses B-Trees. Reiser4 is pretty much the same with it's RAM reliance. The entire concept of dancing trees that reiser4's got relies on keeping a bunch of blocks in RAM. In any case, though, it's a journalled file system, they both are.

On top of that they have a reasonable sync timeout thing. If my machine died while writing to disk, then I'd expect to lose data anyway, who cares if it's 5 seconds or 0.5 seconds, it's journalled so it's supposed to leave the fs in a reasonable state (at least not corrupt).

Third point, optimise for the normal case. Running a slow-arse fs, always being afraid of my machine rebooting isn't really worth it. Maybe in India, where there are constant power outages, or if I were running windows, but I'm not, so...
 
# 3/14/2005 09:44:00 pm
Blogger Unknown
Ok, as long as you're using any too unstable in the rest of the system, it doesn't matter if it's journalled if the journal itself is corrupted. Now if only I can work out why I'm getting data corruption on my desktop windows machine.. it's quite scary.
 
# 3/15/2005 01:16:00 pm
Blogger Foobear
The XFS site says it guarantees filesystem consistency. In addition, look here , or pretty much anywhere there's benchmarks for why I think reiser4's so great.
 

Add Comment


<< Home