Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Ciprian Dorin Craciun <ciprian.craciun@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2013 08:28:21
Message-Id: CA+Tk8fzZ3F3XCt8HdOq8a3CkrqGc3ysXU-QgAbWkUsPBu8r3Hg@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3? by Hilco Wijbenga
1 On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 11:39 PM, Hilco Wijbenga
2 <hilco.wijbenga@×××××.com> wrote:
3 > [...] So when I needed to install a
4 > new machine, I looked around and settled on JFS. This box has been
5 > running for about half a year now (so that includes several power
6 > failures) without any problems. I certainly am very pleased with JFS
7 > so perhaps you might want to consider it.
8
9
10 I've also used (and still use) JFS on a lot of partitions (LVM
11 actually), from my laptops (both rotating and SSD), desktop, VM's,
12 etc. I've moved to it a few years ago after getting tired of all the
13 Ext3 fsck's.
14
15 Although JFS is quite "efficient", and didn't create too much
16 trouble --- never lost an entire file-system, never corrupted data,
17 etc. --- it does have a few quirks:
18
19 * "empty files" after panics --- I think in this regard it's not
20 JFS's fault, but actually badly written software, because things go
21 like this: say you edit a file, save it, and immediately (a few
22 seconds) get either a panic or power failure, the result is an empty
23 file; the technical details are like this: some software first
24 truncate the file, write to it, and close it, but don't sync the data,
25 thus you end up with an empty file; as said I think JFS is correct
26 here, because you don't get a mix of old and new data, etc.; however
27 I've encountered this behavior in quite a few instances...
28
29 * no TRIM support --- obviously really useful on SSD and
30 virtualized disks; (although I remember there was some work done in
31 this respect;)
32 * not enough tooling --- you get only the `jfs-utils`, and that's
33 kind of it...
34 * small community --- if you have a question, you can use the
35 mailing list, it's quite responsive, but there aren't many
36 "data-points" so that you can easily find someone in a similar
37 situation, thus with a solution...
38
39 All in all, I've started gradually migrating my partitions on Ext4.
40
41
42 I stay away for Btrfs for now. And to be frank I don't quite like
43 Btrfs's, and ZFS's for that matter, approach of throwing together all
44 the layers, from the file-system, to the RAID, to the block
45 management, etc. I find the layered approach more appealing --- as in
46 if something goes wrong you can poke around --- of having completely
47 separated block device management (LVM), RAID (MD), and file-system.
48
49
50 A... and for backup file-systems, I use Ext2. Why? My take on this is:
51 * I don't need write or read performance; I don't mind long
52 fsck's; (thus any file-system could fit in here, however see below;)
53 * I do really need reliability and, most importantly, recovery in
54 case s**t...
55
56 Therefore Ext2 is a perfect match:
57 * it is so old, that I guess by now most bugs have been found and squashed;
58 * it is so old, that virtually any Linux (or Windows, FreeBSD, or
59 most other knows OS's) are able to at least read it;
60 * it is so old, that by now I bet there are countless recovery tools;
61 * it is so simple (compared with others), that someone could just
62 re-implement a reader for it, or recovery tools;
63
64 Any feedback about the Ext2 for backups? (Hope I'm not wrong on this one...)
65
66 Ciprian.

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3? Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com>
Re: [Bulk] Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3? Kevin Chadwick <ma1l1ists@××××××××.uk>