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

[Alois Hammer]

Suggestion: put your Portage and database trees on flash storage.  I'd
go with one of two routes: a fast USB stick or a quality CompactFlash
card.  At the moment, the one place I know of to get a quality CF card
is NewEgg: they're selling a couple of "266x" CF4-compliant cards,
Transcend-branded.  Addonics will be happy to sell you an adapter
(~USD$30) that will go into a spare drive bay and turn the CF card
into some really, really fast UDMA storage.

(If it's not at least CF3-compliant, your CF storage will still work
happily as an IDE hard drive, but it'll do it at PIO transfer rates,
and you were looking for speed.)

Putting both /usr/portage and /var/db on flash memory pulls it
completely off any disk spindles that you'd otherwise have to share
with /, or /usr, or whatever other filesystems you're likely to have
on magnetic media.

A word of warning, either way: don't put a Linux-native filesystem on
any kind of flash memory.  Wear leveling only works if the memory
controller understands the filesystem you're writing to the drive.
That means FAT16, or FAT32 if you're lucky.  And, yes, I've tried to
get information out of Transcend sales on whether or not they sell any
products that speak alternative filesystems.  I never got an answer
back, which I think means, "Ha ha ha!  *wipes tears*  That's funny!
Ask another one!"

I'd ask, say, OCZ, but Transcend manufactured both of my "OCZ" USB flash drives.

Still interested?  You'll want about 2GB total: that seems to hold the
entire current Portage tree, plus a good-sized /var/db, and leaves
something like 500MB free for growth.  Get 4GB if you're paranoid;
it's cheap anyway.  This assumes that you don't store
/usr/portage/distfiles on the flash storage.  I wouldn't, and didn't:
make /usr/portage/distfiles a symlink to somewhere on your magnetic
media, and make sure that the new directory ("/usr/distfiles" in my
case) is owned by root:portage so that you can leave
FEATURES="userfetch" turned on in make.conf.

For sanity reasons, you may want to mount your new FAT16/32 filesystem
with -o uid=0,gid=0.  Or, if you're using FEATURES="userpriv," maybe
uid=250,gid=250 (portage:portage on my machine).  That all depends on
your particular FEATURE flags.

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 8:36 AM, Strong Cypher <cypherstrong@×××××.com> wrote:
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> Hi,
>
> I'm looking for an alternative to ext2/3.
>
> I have put reiser3/4 out because of project seems to be off now ... or not
> really active
>
> I really want an active project.
>
> Is they a good fs that is extremly adapted to gentoo system (portage ...)
>
> Is they fs that support gzip like reiser4 do ?
>
> For exemple , with reiser4 the portage directory don't take a lot of space,
> and so read it it's really fast...
>
> I want a alternative
>
> is ext4 a good alternative ?
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