Re: [gentoo-user] Ext4 status - Alternative to ext2/3 for gentoo portage and more

[Aaron Clark]

Dirk Heinrichs wrote:
> Am Freitag, 15. Februar 2008 schrieb ext Strong Cypher:
>
>> For exemple , with reiser4 the portage directory don't take a lot of
>> space, and so read it it's really fast...
>
> The same is true for reiser3.
>
>> I want a alternative
>
> Well, there are plenty: xfs, jfs, ...

Of the current main four FS's on modern linux, here's a general overview 
of them:

ext3: Older, reliable, stable.  You get very good tools support for ext3 
  (including online resize) and low cpu-usage for the most part but it's 
slower and less space efficient than more recent fs's.

jfs: Better performance than ext3, deals with larger files reasonably 
well with low cpu usage.  Not very commonly used to my knowledge.

reiserfs (reiser3): very fast for most operations (the exception being 
directory creation iirc), especially efficient for dealing with many 
small files.  It has noticeably higher cpu-usage than ext3/jfs.  I 
believe there are also some potential performance bottlenecks on SMP 
systems as it makes liberal use of the Big Kernel Lock.

xfs: high performance, especially when dealing with many large or small 
files; Gets along very well with raid arrays.  Noticeably higher cpu 
usage than ext3/jfs.  IIRC, it aggressively caches its writes so there 
is a slight possibility of data loss if your power goes out suddenly in 
the middle of a series of writes (I consider this a very small 
possibility, it is journalled like the other fs's on this list so the 
filesystem will still come up in a consistent state, you just may be 
missing some of the data you were writing).  Very good online tools 
support provided with it.

I'm sure someone will jump in to correct me if I've misremembered 
something.  Favorite filesystems can be a bit like Window Manager or 
favorite Desktop debates.

Aaron


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