filesystems in Linux????

[Bully_Crist]

ok, please don't flame me for my ignorance, but what's the difference between the Ext2FS file system and the ReiserFS(sp?) file system?

[MkIII_Supra]

ext2fs == a piece of crap in a hard reboot / power failure.... that's about all I can say on it.

Reiser... well it's a journaled file systems and it totally rocks! What this means is, if you are in the middle of a transfer or some heavy processing and you lose power (or you have a kid like I do....) and the system is shutdown improperly no worries mate! Reiser will pretty much 99.9% recover without a hitch or much of a slow down.

Here is an example of ext2fs vs. Reiser:

First hardware specs...
AMD Duron 700MHz
256MB PC-133 SDRAM
20GB Quantum Fireball UDMA-66 7200RPM
27GB Maxtor UDMA-66 7200RPM
ATi Xpert2000 32MB AGP X2
Creative Ensoniq sound
PS/2 Keyboard
Serial Mouse
Mitsubishi Diamond Scan 70 17"

I used to run Mandrake 7.2 with the ReiserFS, and there were a couple of instances where I locked my `Drake up so bad that I had to hit the on/off button to recover. Now under normal boot times with the 2.2.17-21mdk kernel running the ReiserFS and Aurora it would take 1 minute and 19 seconds to load.

Now if I locked the system with the ReiserFS, which I have done more often than is supposed to be possible in Linux... it would only take an additional 10-15 seconds to boot up. And if I was in the middle of a file transfer `Drake would start where it was interrupted.

Now the same hardware running Red-Hat Wolverine with the 2.4.1-0.1.9 kernel and using ext2fs, a clean boot takes 57 seconds, which means that I have gained 22 seconds from boot time just by using the 2.4 series kernel... but if I lock the system up, which I have been doing lately while trying to get OpenGl to install so I can play a game, I have to wait for fsck to run, and with 2 drive at an equivalent to 47GB well.... the last time I had to force a reboot it took 38 minutes and 17 seconds from the time I pushed the on/off button till I was able to log in. I was lucky because nothing got fried, this time. But I have had the ext2fs get obliterated more than once and my lack of knowladge at that time I was unable to repair it.

So in my personal opinion, ext2fs suk's ***, Reiser ROCKS!!! and as soon as Red-Hat distributes a distro with the 2.4 series kernel and Reiser I will install it and be done with the nightmare of ext2fs.

One other thing I have noticed is that my Reiser systems were less prone to lock up and if you kept them up form extended periods of time (I wish I could....) they don't suffer the inode nightmare that the ext2fs does.

Journaled is the way to go. Some will say that it's slower, yeah and if you can see the difference then you are the machine it's installed on! The speed difference is negligable, remember we are talking data rates in the milisecond time frame... can you track something moving that fast? :rolleyes:

[DrDebian]

Originally posted by MkIII_Supra:
<STRONG>ext2fs == a piece of crap in a hard reboot / power failure.... that's about all I can say on it.

Reiser... well it's a journaled file systems and it totally rocks! What this means is, if you are in the middle of a transfer or some heavy processing and you lose power (or you have a kid like I do....) and the system is shutdown improperly no worries mate! Reiser will pretty much 99.9% recover without a hitch or much of a slow down.

So in my personal opinion, ext2fs suk's ***, Reiser ROCKS!!! and as soon as Red-Hat distributes a distro with the 2.4 series kernel and Reiser I will install it and be done with the nightmare of ext2fs.

One other thing I have noticed is that my Reiser systems were less prone to lock up and if you kept them up form extended periods of time (I wish I could....) they don't suffer the inode nightmare that the ext2fs does.

Journaled is the way to go. Some will say that it's slower, yeah and if you can see the difference then you are the machine it's installed on! The speed difference is negligable, remember we are talking data rates in the milisecond time frame... can you track something moving that fast? :rolleyes:</STRONG>

I have recently switched my Debian 2.2r2 system to kernel 2.2.19 and applied the ReiserFS patches. In the process, I said "to hell with ext2" and moved my / to ReiserFS as well. All I can say is that I don't know why I didn't switch any earlier! While the journaling does in theory impose a speed penalty, the much improved storage algorithm makes up for it more than double!

This might not be obvious on really fast media, but it certainly shows on old SCSI-disks or ZIP-media. Just to make sure, I ran bonnie++ on an old HD of mine three times: first formatted with ReiserFS, then Ext2 and last (stupid, I know) vFAT.

To say that ReiserFS blew both other contestants out of the water would be an inexcusable understatement! While the run with ReiserFS completed in less than 2 minutes, the run using Ext2 took over 11 minutes and I aborted the vFAT run after 45 minutes.

IMHO ReiserFS should become the default FS for Linux distributions, at least while other commercial derivates like XFS et al are not ready for primetime on Linux. Go Reiser!!