Best file system for Linux?

[chris31_80]

Is the only file system for linux ext 2, or can it run on others? Also, is ext 2 the best for Linux speed-wise if it can run on others? Thanks. :)

[Craig McPherson]

ReiserFS is much better than Ext2 in terms of speed, and it's also journaling, meaning that it's instantly ready to rock after an improper shutdown, unlike Ext2. It's all-around cool, especially for server systems.

Ext3 is idential to Ext2, except that it's journaling, which makes it much slower than Ext2. Steer clear of it.

XFS is still in the fairly early stages, but it's very high-tech and killer-radical. It's also journaling, and it might be faster than ReiserFS. Unlike the previous two, you'd have to patch your kernel in order to compile in support for it, and I'm not sure how it fares in terms of reliability at this point. Unless you're very bleeding-edge, check out ReiserFS instead.

For the time being, I use ReiserFS for everything except my / partition, which I leave as Ext2 because ReiserFS doesn't yet support the Immutable flag, which I need.

[ 16 June 2001: Message edited by: Craig McPherson ]

[Craig McPherson]

Linux can also support filesystems from nearly other OS, including fat and vfat (both of them in either fat12, fat16, and fat32 versions), NTFS (only safe to use read-only), HPFS, and many filesystems from other UNIX OS's. However, the non-UNIX like NTFS would be useless as system partitions because they don't support the same permissions and ownerships that Linux does.

Linux originally used the Minix filesystem, which it still supports, and then used the original Ext filesystem after that. There's no reason you'd want to use either of those: Minix is somewhat dated with its whopping 40MB partition size limit, and the original Ext (now known as Ext1) isn't much better.

Some people still use Minix or Ext1 filesystems on floppy disks, though, just because they're so small and have such little overhead.

[shaggy112]

i agree....i use reiserfs. it is quicker, and no fear of losing data when you don't properly halt system.

[chris31_80]

Anyone know of where to get Reiser? Or is it a Debian thing? :)

[element-x]

http://www.namesys.com/


Check it out there.

[klamath]

XFS is still in the fairly early stages, but it's very high-tech and killer-radical. It's also journaling, and it might be faster than ReiserFS. Unlike the previous two, you'd have to patch your kernel in order to compile in support for it, and I'm not sure how it fares in terms of reliability at this point. Unless you're very bleeding-edge, check out ReiserFS instead


Well, keep in mind that XFS is a port of SGI's filesystem for IRIX -- and XFS for IRIX is absolutely, completely rock solid (it's been used by tons of people for very intensive stuff for a long time). So although the Linux port is still relatively young, the code itself is rock solid. And they HAVE released '1.0' -- which seems to imply that they think it's at least somewhat production-ready. It also has some cool features and is supposed to be very fast.

[Craig McPherson]

ReiserFS is included in kernels 2.4.1 and above, so you no longer have to patch the kernel. The 2.4.1+ kernel source also includes the soruce code for the ReiserFS tools, so you don't have to install them seperately if you don't want to -- just read the README in the kernel source about them.

If you're still using a 2.2 kernel, you'll have to patch the kernel source to get ReiserFS -- why not just take the plunge and use 2.4.5 intead?