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Programming IT Technology

Which Partition Types Are Superior? 283

Posted by Hemos from the good-question dept.
digitalmonkey2k1 writes: "I am currently planning on running an Apache web server and a small ftp on my pc. There are so many file systems that Linux can support now that I'm not certain what ones should be used for certain features. If anyone knows of a comparison list between them, somthing to give a pro/con method of deciding the best sort of configuration It would be greatly appreciated."
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Which Partition Types Are Superior? More

Which Partition Types Are Superior?

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  • It's never failed me! But if you want some sort of insurance, give ext3 a try. it's pretty schweet.

    Just DON'T even think about vfat or NTFS!

    • Just DON'T even think about vfat or NTFS!

      Perhaps you meant using an NTFS fs under Linux, however if not: What's your problem with NTFS? NTFS 4 and NTFS 5 are very feature laden, impressive filesystems, so I'm curious what your problem with them is, apart from perhaps that they're from Microsoft.

      • It is the fact that you have to run some version of WinNT to use them.

      • Re:What's your problem with NTFS? (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I assume he means under Linux. The NTFS driver for Linux is still unstable for writing.
      • It's been my experience, that, yes, under Linux NTFS is highly unstable.

        However, it's also been my experience that under NTFS is damn unstable under WinNT as well.

        Case in point... A production system I was running several years ago crashed. (NT4 SBS, PDC) The system HD was fried but the data drive was OK (backed up on RAID anyway.) When I attempted to reinstall the OS, for some strange reason NT told me the permissions on the data drive made it unusable! I ended up having to devise a particularly dangerous registry hack (involving NT's rescue boot-disk and reinstallation procedure) just to get access to a filesystem that should have just been readable right off the bat. Needless to say the system was down for several hours.

        In another job, as a contract sysadmin for anout forty different clients, I was dealing with *constant* fs problems with NT.

        Really, I only mentioned vfat and NTFS because I've met many linux newbies who are nervous that if they don't use a windows compatible FS they will be locked into Linux forever. (not that that's such a bad thing) :^)

        While ACL's are great, you can certainly use several different patches on ext2 and ext3 for those, or even use XFS. For a small web server, though, I don't think he needs anything more than ext2.

        Just my $.02.

  • Partition != File System (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lkaos ( 187507 ) <anthony@codemonk ... s minus math_god> on Sunday October 28, 2001 @11:31AM (#2489586) Homepage Journal
    Therefore partition type is quite different from what file system to use.

    Besides, wasn't there just a story on Linux Advanced File Systems [slashdot.org]????

    There is no reason why use shouldn't use ReiserFS. Performs just as well (for the most part) as ext2 and will improve uptime by eliminating nasty fscks in the event of a failure.

    The more interesting question probably is what kernel should you be using????

    Kudos to story posters for having so many dups today. Really keeping us on our toes huh?
    • reisferfs doesn't have backup and restore utilities, which can make like more than ... interesting.


      And no, tar is not an option, no matter what some Nameless Kernel Guru says. I've found that tar and cpio are awfully fragile and resource hoggish when it comes to backing up lots of data.

      • evildead on the kernel mailing list someone reported that "dump" corrupts ext2 in the latest kernel whilst "tar" will not corrupt it so for now tar is the ONLY backup option for ext2
    • There is no reason why use shouldn't use ReiserFS.

      This is insightful? I kinda figured a post had to be RIGHT to be insightful...

      There are several reasons not to use Reiser. There are lots of reasons to use it, as well, but you can't claim there are no reasons not to use it.

      One reason not to use Reiser might be that you're building a box that doesn't need it. A firewall with a very small hard drive and a good power backup, for instance.

      Another might be vendor support for your specific distribution. RedHat supports ext3 better currently, for instance.

      Just because their FAQ says there are no reasons doesn't mean there aren't any.
  • Which filesystems to use for Linux is becoming far too big of a deal here on Slashdot. Can't we consider it a FAQ and let people do their own research?
    • "Can't we consider this a FAQ and refuse to answer it?" Heh. It seems like a more appropriate response to point him to an actual "FAQ" (i.e. a document discussing the advantages and disadvantages of various Linux filesystems). I'm sure several such things exist, though since ext2 is good enough for me, I don't know where to find one.


      /s


      Moderators: why is this rated "insightful"?

  • Short answer: (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Matt2000 ( 29624 ) on Sunday October 28, 2001 @11:32AM (#2489592) Homepage

    If you're looking to set up a small Apache and FTP for your friends, the short answer is probably: WHO CARES.

    Ext2 will be more than sufficient, and if you feel like it just download the latest Redhat (7.2) and get Ext3 default for free. It probably won't make much difference to you for this task unless you're in an area powered by thousands of gerbils on wheels who happen to get tired at the same time.
    • unless you're in an area powered by thousands of gerbils on wheels who happen to get tired at the same time.

      I do not think that Afghanistan has internet access at this time... ;P

    • Re:Short answer: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Spacelord ( 27899 )
      Why even go as far as downloading a specific distro for it?

      I converted my slackware 8.0 system to ext3 in about 30 minutes. It's as simple as compiling a kernel with ext3 support, run tune2fs -j -Jsize=10 /dev/hdax and changing the fs type to ext3 in etc/fstab. Piece of cake...

  • Get a journaled FS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by chrysalis ( 50680 ) on Sunday October 28, 2001 @11:33AM (#2489593) Homepage
    XFS, ReiserFS, JFS or EXT3. Get a journaled FS. The reason is that as long as your system is up and running, having a fs like ext2 is no problem. But if you ever have crashes, long fsck (that something fail) means downtime. And for production servers, this is definitely something to avoid.
    XFS and ReiserFS are the more mature fs IMHO (on Linux) . I run EXT3 on systems that were previously running EXT2, because it's easy to upgrade. But I had some troubles with EXT3 not so long ago (corrupted files during a compilation, not even after a crash) .
    ReiserFS is the best if you have a lot of small files. Both for performance and space. XFS is believed to be better for large files.
    Also, if you need performance, FS is one thing, but software is another thing. Apache is probably the slowest web server out there (although very powerful (altough less than Roxen and Caudium :)) .
    Running Zeus, Tux or (for static content) WebFS will give you a huge performance increase, even on a slow filesystem.

    • Apache is probably the slowest web server out there

      It's plenty fast enough if you connection to your web "customers" is through a T-3 or smaller - it will pump out data, even from a mod_perl script, fast enough to flood the link. I've never put it on a faster link so I don't know how much faster a link it will flood.
    • Why journal? He's serving content, so the filesystem will be mostly read-only. He's presumably not doing anything mission-critical, so an extra 10-minute fsck on (hopefully infrequent) reboots is not a big deal; if the system's staying up for ~100 days at a time, this is almost a total non-issue.


      /s

      • Fair points, but consider this:

        Why not journal? What could you possibly lose by running a filesystem that protects the integrity of your data better, and runs faster?

        As an aside, if he's exclusively serving data out, then the filesystem should be explicitly mounted read-only. Security and safety all at once!

    • Re:Get a journaled FS (Score:2, Informative)

      by captaineo ( 87164 )
      If you are using ReiserFS be aware that it does not journal file data, only filesystem metadata - i.e. after a crash your directory tree will always be intact, but files that were open during the crash can and will often have junk or misplaced data written to them.

      It is for this reason that I'm switching my machines to ext3. IMHO corrupted files after a crash are just as intolerable as a corrupted filesystem. (ext3 does have a reiserfs-like metadata-only journaling mode, but by default it journals everything - at a small performance cost of course).

      • That's true also of IBM's JFS, and probably XFS. Microsoft's NTFS makes even fewer guarantees. Journalling data is very slow and usually unnecessary.
      • corrupted files after a crash are just as intolerable as a corrupted filesystem.

        But journaling data doesn't get you too far if the programs you use aren't clever enough. Far too often an editor replaces file during saving instead of first writing a new one, after that removing old one and renaming new file to old filename. If your editor doesn't do this you're pretty much fscked up whether or not your filesystem supports journaling of data or not.

        On the other hand if you're editing big file the feature that editor replaces the file is must because you might not have enough disk space or quota to store it twice. The same applies for databases and stuff that needs to keep files open for acceptable performance. If an editor does write changes to new file first and only after that removes old file and still data is missing after crash it's simply unacceptable. There should be very few cases where data journaling actually helps.

        • Far too often an editor replaces file during saving instead of first writing a new one, after that removing old one and renaming new file to old filename.

          No, this is the correct way to update files. If you follow your instructions, then the permissions, any hard links will be lost.

    • Journaling file systems have extra runtime overhead. If your system is disk bound, you lose more time on journaling while the system is up than you would over the rare fsck. Your recommendation is particularly incongruent because you recommend, at the same time, web servers that give better performance only in very highly loaded systems (unlikely to be encountered in practice).

      Other problems with journaling file systems are that they are more complex, less mature, and have appeared only more recently in the Linux kernel, meaning there is a higher probability that they have some problem.

      If you can't tolerate the few minutes of downtime resulting from an fsck, then a journaling file system is not going to help you either since machines become unavailable for lots of other reasons. In that case, you need network mirroring with a hot failover. Journaling file systems are more about convenience than any particularly rational engineering tradeoff.

      Altogether, my recommendation is: don't pick software just because it's hot and new. For most users, ext2 with Apache makes a great web server platform. Apache is fast enough for any kind of Internet connection you are likely to have (Microsoft could probably serve all their static content from a single Apache server). If you like the convenience of a journaling file system and don't mind the performance hit, maybe you want to consider ReiserFS, which offers a lot of other useful features.

      • While I won't get into the reliability of Linux journalling filesystems I can tell you that few companies would use a high-end system without such a filesystem.

        You can waste a very large amount of time checking a filesystem after the system goes down unexpectedly (for whatever reason).

        A journaling filesystem adds very little overhead, except when a large number of files are created, or deleted. As such, it is NOT going to have a large impact to a well configured webserver

      • For most users, ext2 with Apache makes a great web server platform.

        I wouldn't use ext2 for any server even if I didn't need journaling. ReiserFS should be faster during reading especially if you happen to have many small files or a couple huge files. Journaling shouldn't matter performance if you aren't updating anything. And if you're, you should be using journaling anyway. So in the end, if you choose ReiserFS over ext2 you should get at least better performance. You might also get journaling as an added bonus.

        I don't know if ReiserFS is the best journaling filesystem, but it's the one I have used and it has never disappointed me. OTOH, I have lost ext2 partition once... The only reason to use ext2 is either you're really low on memory (kernel size) or you have to use ext2 for backwards compatibility - for example I know about driver to read ext2 partitions from windows but I haven't found a one for reiserfs. Another way is obviously a piece of cake.

    • Re:Get a journaled FS (Score:3, Informative)

      by Bryce ( 1842 )
      Here's a report on performance of some of these file systems: http://www.osdl.org/reports/journal_fs/ [osdl.org]. Obviously, performance is only one factor to consider when choosing a file system, so YMMV.

  • Which I would choose (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 1stflight ( 48795 )
    For Linux, I've got to say that with the right hardware (fast drives) any of the newer journaling filesystems would be excellent. Why?
    1. Data protection - the journaling systems Reiserfs, Ext3, XFS; etc offer far better and faster recovery than Ext2 does
    2. Configurable, though I've never found a need to do it, you can set the block sizes in Ext2 and 3 to optimize it for larger files or smaller ones

    What to stay away from fat/vfat/fat32. Why?
    1. No security, period

    *clink, clink* just my two cents..
    • 2. Configurable, though I've never found a need to do it, you can set the block sizes in Ext2 and 3 to optimize it for larger files or smaller ones

      This is less a performance enhancement and more a hack because of the finite amount of available inodes in ext filesystems.

      ReiserFS dynamically allocates inodes so such as hack is unnecessary. ext filesystems are no more configurable than ReiserFS.

      In fact, one can make very few arguments for using ext over ReiserFS. As reiser matures, I don't think there will be any reason to use ext2.

  • File system is half the disk story (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I can't address your question directly, but don't forget that things like block size can have just as large an effect on file system performance as the vhoice of FS itself.

  • ReiserFS (Score:2, Interesting)

    by abcdefg23562 ( 448838 )
    I would use ReiserFS, it has always worked good for me.
    The best part is the journalling, if your machine with a 50 gig drive loses power and reboots, you do not have to go through a lengthy fsck, this would greatly decrease the boot time of your server.

  • Ext3 with standard dos-type partitions (Score:5, Informative)

    by 1010011010 ( 53039 ) on Sunday October 28, 2001 @11:40AM (#2489611) Homepage
    DOS-type partitions are the most common on PCs, the most expected, and the easiest to deal with.

    Ext3 is basically ext2 with journalling. It performs better than Ext2, though. In a pinch you can always mount it as ext2.

    You're not running anything exotic. Stick with the standards.
    • Ah, no. Linux native partitions (83) if you want to support ext2 or any other fs.

      DOS-type (6, e) partions will not support a linux filesystem.

      I imagine your not referring to FAT32 (b, c) since that is in no way a DOS partition whereas FAT16 was just an extension of the original DOS filesystem much like the PE executable is just an extension of the MZ executable.
      • Ah, no. DOS-type partitions are the standard 4-primary, or less than 4 primary plus one or more "extended" partitions with "logical drives" (paritions) in them. These partitions may be marked as being MSDOS, NTFS, QNX or whatever. But they are still DOS-style partitions. I.e., what you get by partitioning your disk with DOS fdisk.

        In contrast, you can have BSD-style disk slices or some other partitioning scheme that bears no relation to what DOS uses.
      • I think you misunderstood the post you're replying to.

        He was suggesting using the standard DOS partitioning scheme (you know -- up to 4 primary partitions, one of which can be turned into a logical/extended partition for more partitions) with an ext2 filesystem put onto these partitions.

        There are other options -- you could just mke2fs /dev/hda if you wanted to, and you could use one of the other available partitioning schemes if you wanted -- but using the standard DOS scheme probably makes the most sense for most people.

  • Reiserfs, if you've got good hardware (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I like Reiserfs the best. That's to say: it is fast, is a journal filesystem and it's fast.

    As to reliability: if you've got good hardware, there shouldn't be any troubles at all. I for one, don't have good hardware. /usr/local/mp3 resides on a partition that seems to have some errors on the disk. I lost several mp3s before I realized that the disk was screwed up. Nope, you don't get any early warnings from reiserfs.

    Their repair tools suck, by the way.

    So why do I keep using it? It's fast, is suse's default filesystem and it's fast.

  • NO, NO, NO! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ajuda ( 124386 )
    Your question is like a lot of the following:

    Which is the best car?

    Who is the best actor?

    Where is the best place to live?

    None of these questions can be answered without saying "It depends" and neither can yours. Very rarely is anything better than everything else is every single way.

    • He's asking for a comparison list of features between the various filesystems, not "which one is best". Read the post again.

    • Re:NO, NO, NO! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by IpalindromeI ( 515070 )
      Very rarely is anything better than everything else is every single way.

      Watermelon is better than every other fruit in every single way.

  • ReiserFS has distinct advantages. (Score:5, Informative)

    by dbuttric ( 9027 ) <dbuttrickNO@SPAMgeekforce.com> on Sunday October 28, 2001 @11:42AM (#2489618) Homepage
    I use it for the document root of my webservers. It offers faster access to the files themselves, while having very good fault tolerance.

    I serve very few dynamic documents - I'm getting alot of milage out of small machines. My sites have a deep directory structure, with fairly few files in each. ReiserFS shines for this layout.

    I tested several different FS for this application, ReiserFS won for me.

    Oh yeah, the other benefit is the relative ease of install and upgrade.
  • If you are going to choose a Journalized FS, check out the benchmarks and see which ones best suit your need. For example if you need little writing, but lots of read access (eg, data warehouse)... or if you need lots of servlets constantly accessing/updating data... or if it is a simple web server... you should look at which Journalized FS is best for you via a look at the benchmarks/home pages for the appropriate FS.

    I personally use Reiser FS on my "home surfing/programming" machine... because of the extensive support (especially in certain distros).

  • My preferred partition type is... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mzito ( 5482 ) on Sunday October 28, 2001 @11:46AM (#2489623) Homepage
    83! It's easy to remember, simple, and comes default in 100% of linux distributions.

    Of course, there are those who are type 82 bigots. I can see how that's important, but with RAM prices so low these days....

    Matt
    • Gotta have some 82... I don't care if you have a 1GB of memory. Swapping is so much fun!
    • RedHat 7.2 uses ext3 as a default. I am not sure though, which number assosiates with that, but my bet would be that it is not 83, therefor your statement about 100% of linux distributions is not true :)

      • Well, it was a joke - but yes, it does use 83 as its partition type.

        Matt
      • Even thogh this is a joke, it does touch upon an important point that some replies apparently don't understand:

        Partition type is different from partition format. ReiserFS, XFS, ext2, ext3, JFS are all partition formats and are the filesystems used on the disk. Partition type is only a number in the partition table, and in their Linux incarnations, all the aforementioned filesystems use type 83, simply indicating that partition is meant for Linux. You can call a partition type 69, and still format it with ext2 for all that it matters.
    • It's nice to have some type 8e around too - Linux LVM [www.suse.de]. Logical volume management lets you do some cool things, like re-sizing your partitions with the data in place. You can add free space to a logical volume with reiserfs while it's "live", although you have to unmount the volume if you want to shrink it. *Very* handy when you don't know at install-time exactly how much space is going to be taken up by your /home, /usr, /var/log, etc.

      Of course the Amiga "RDB" partitioning scheme had its nice points too. Linux can read it, but I don't know if there are any Linux tools to create one.
  • If you are running a big server with mad power you probably want ReiserFS. If you are running anything else you probably want ext3. You wont notice any difference between the two unless you are running a very large powerful web server with many visitors, like slashdot here. For you, just about any file system on the list will work.

  • My choices (Score:2, Interesting)

    by secondsun ( 195377 )
    I used ext2 about a year or so ago. I didn't mind the fscks (I only had a 4 GB drive) but 2 times it didn't work and I had to maunally fix some files. Then I got reiserfs and to this day I have had no troubles (short of a tree rebuild every few months just to improve speed).

    I did have a vfat drive (40 GB) that had a whole bunch of stuff from a when I used windows (98 SE then 2000 then XP) then I reinstalled and used it as a secondary drive. Worked for a few months until the partition table became corrupt, NOrton couldn't fix it and well here I am. (It is now a 40 GB reiser fs partition.)

    Secondsun
  • When choosing a filesystem, you want to build compatibility into your system, so that you can afford to change your mind later if you want to change the way you do things. With that in mind, I think you would be best off with using NTFS for your filesystem. Not only does it have advanced ACL support and built-in filesystem encryption (which is handy if you are the type to worry about security problems), but it also performs at a very advanced level, literally blowing away such "free" systems such as ext2.

    Best of all, you can fully utilize it under Linux as well as Windows 2000, so if you feel like you would be better off with developing under Windows, you wouldn't have to reformat your whole disk and lose data in the process. Benchmarks have consistently shown [microsoft.com] that it is an enterprise-class performer.

    Finally, you have to consider reliability in decisions such as these. NTFS just doesn't lose data, which is more than we can say of such "lossy" systems such as ReiserFS. Frankly, I can't even see why people put such "journaling" systems on production machines. All in all, you can't go wrong with NTFS.

    • I can see you havn't been reading anything on NTFS latley. Do you know what *usually(not always)* happens when you write to an NTFS partition under linux? .... things go wrong. The whole filesystem can get corrupted. ReiserFS or EXT3 would be the better of the choices in my humble oppinion.
    • uhhh this has to be a troll
      #1 ntfs doesnt work under linux
      #2 there are "free" systems that have ACLS (i believe XFS is one such)
      #3 ext2 supports encryption i believe
      and #4 NTFS is journaled i believe.
    • > Finally, you have to consider reliability in decisions such as these. NTFS just doesn't lose data

      Then why is the Linux write-drivers marked "dangerous" and "back up your NTFS volume first, because it will probably get damaged"[!!!]? Trying to run Linux off NTFS just sounds like a bad idea.

  • Whats wrong with google? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Whats wrong with google? Surely it is more appropriate to search for this kind of thing, instead of making it into another askslashdot.

  • ACLs on ext2, ext3, xfs (Score:5, Informative)

    by trackzero ( 532476 ) on Sunday October 28, 2001 @11:51AM (#2489635) Homepage
    I administer a network of about 25 linux boxen used largely for file service. For such work, I must say that with 9,000 users and about 30 groups, I consisder ACLs a necessity. I've been using the "Bestbits" ext2 acl patch with great luck (acl.bestbits.at [bestbits.at]). I've heard that a cousin to this patch can be applied to ext3, but I haven't tried it yet. I'm drawn to XFS for its maturity, durability, and of course its ACL support.

    The XFS command line utilities seem to be less effective than the Bestbits patches & utils, and the Samba 2.2.1a support seems to be a bit off with its handling of recursive descents and inheritance. To be fair on both counts, I'm still learning the file system, and the problems could be all mine.

    I'd thought about ReiserFS, but I really need those ACLs.

    Just some thoughts. Any errors are all mine. Please feel free to correct. I have no pride.

  • ReiserFS is better. (Score:5, Informative)

    by chicobaud ( 311755 ) on Sunday October 28, 2001 @11:52AM (#2489636)
    This FS doesn't fragment file around partition space, major advantage if you install in hardware RAID. Fragmentation is a big problem for performance, so if it doesn't happen you have a good access time. I use ReiserFS on SuSE and Mandrake, it is fast/good, doesn't loose data and I tried the journaling by shutdonw bad my isntallation many times before a fresh install, never lost a single file, this amazed me since I dilike the fschk everytime maximal mount count and a forced unmounted FS situation happened.
    Try ReiserFS. Too bad RedHat 7.2 decide not to support ReiserFS, I will give up - with regreat - on RedHat.
    • 1) Nice try on the English, don't worry.. you'll get there!
      2) Just because RedHat doesn't implement ReiserFS "natively" does NOT mean you cannot use it, nor does it mean that RH "decided" not to support it. They simply chose a different journaling FS which, imho, works pretty well.

      Are there any other distributions that implement Reiser as default?
      • Your english needs improvement too (choose is not chose). Falas a minha língua, mas não sabes ladrar ?

        I mention RedHat 7.2 because they seem to avoid European stuff many times, after all ext3 is the same as ext2. ReiserFS is much faster when you don't want file fragmention. ext3 was not designed from ground up and looking for file access time as goald one.
  • PC partition tables are a pile of crap, legacy crap going back 20 years, we only need LBA support and nothing else.

    Whats the go with 4 primary partitions, the nextended partitions, some OS's primary partitions have to overlap extended partitions, some they done, some you can only use 1 primary partition, some you can use them all.

    And having to reserve the whole first track, usually 32 sectors, just to put in about 170 bytes of data... what a waste.

    The extra space can be used by other disk externder type programs, but there is no standard way to reserve it or anything, its first in best dressed, use it at your own risk.

    And look at what it has to do, it just has to mark the start and end of a section of raw disk space, how difficult is it ?

    The format has just been butchered too much by too many people. But for practical reasons we are stuck with PC partition tables because of convenience for the masses.

    You could do a raw LVM partition.
    I like Acorn partition types (if thats the one im thinking of), nice and simple, only what you need.

  • Let's not confuse FS and Partition type (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 28, 2001 @11:56AM (#2489644)
    The question asked for information about partitition schema, not file systems. And yet almost every post so far has been about file systems.

    IMHO, if you want a superior partition scheme, you should not use the linux system, which is identical in structure to the Microsoft DOS system. Instead, read about the BSD partition (and slice) system. See section 2.5.2 of the (new) 2d edition handbook:

    http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/install-steps.html [freebsd.org]

    In BSD, the Microsoft-Linux concept of partitions is preserved as "slices" that exist to hold collections of files systems. (In FreeBSD, you can man hier(8) to read more about this. Unlike linux, where every vendor puts things in /opt, /etc/, /usr/local, and so on, the BSD system is very rigid--there's even a man page about where things belong.)

    Another option in BSD is the use of what are called "dangerously dedicated" system where the entire disk becomes one slides, with no other partition. Read more about this in the handbook. There's even information about working with different flavors of partition types.

    I suppose to give 'equal time' we should give a link to the Microsoft/Linux partition scheme, so here one is:

    http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7-Man ual/ref-guide/ch-partitions.html [redhat.com]

    FYI-- here's some news you won't see on /.'s main page: The FreeBSD handbook (first link above) was just (48 hours ago) released in its second edition. This is a significant documentation change, and all the daemons are celebrating. Join us!
    • bsd partitions have a lot of cruft in them, there are fields for storing all sorts of irrelivant information.

      (e.g fields extracted from http://www.tac.eu.org/cgi-bin/man-cgi?disklabel+5)

      num of spare sectors per track
      num of spare sectors per cylinder
      num of alt. cylinders per unit
      rotational speed
      hardware sector interleave
      sector 0 skew, per track
      sector 0 skew, per cylinder
      head switch time, usec
      track-to-track seek, usec

      cmon, do we need/want this information with modern storage systems, the details are taken care of in hardware, we dont need to clutter up our partition tables.

      Not something to boast about.

      lame slashdot lame filter prevented acurate formating
    • Notice how that is no longer an option in the later 4.X series?

      It 'was' dangerous....if you did any kind of CVSup and rebuilt your kernel, things like top would stop working. SCSI drives formatted on DPT RAID cards would boot with an error on Adaptec cards, and a upgrade from 3.x to 4.x would break.

      If you ran in a non-dedicated mode, rebuilds had no effect. Same with the SCSI issue.

    • "The question asked for information about partitition schema, not file systems."

      Actually, the question asked about filesystems, quite clearly. The headline asked about partition types. Who comes up with the headline--the poster, or Hemos?

    • Even though the question is obviously about filesystems...

      IMHO, if you want a superior partition scheme, you should not use the linux system, which is identical in structure to the Microsoft DOS system. Instead, read about the BSD partition (and slice) system.

      The problem with BSDs partition is that most people run BSD on x86 boxes these days, so they end up putting it all inside of an old-fashioned "fdisk" style partition. Then you get the worst of both worlds. And if you go dedicated, everyone looks at you funny. "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANNA DO THAT?" Good grief, what are you supposed to say?

      If you wanna see a partitioning system that really rocks, go back to the mid-80s and you'll find something that's better than anything else in use today: Amiga's RDB. And to think that this will fade into oblivion! Gee, thanks for reminding me how badly dilapidated and decayed personal computer technology is becoming. Here I am all happy that daylight savings time has finally ended and I get my stolen hour back, and someone has to remind me of a downer.

      Using a PC these days is like touring Dunwich and Innsmouth.

  • Doesn't matter. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Man of E ( 531031 ) <i.have@no.email.com> on Sunday October 28, 2001 @12:05PM (#2489655)
    Look, if you're just running a small apache and ftp server on your pc, it probably doesn't make much of a difference. You're probably going to take heavier performance hits from all the other stuff that's running than because your file system, kernel, partition, etc is not optimal. You only need to worry about this if you're building a dedicated system that's going to take lots of hits.

    I'm running apache and ftp right now, and average traffic is about 20 hits per day. At this order of magnitude, or anywhere near it, it really doesn't matter.

    • I'm running apache and ftp right now, and average traffic is about 20 hits per day.

      And of course, the easiest way to change that is by telling people about it in Slashdot. Smart move. Good thing you didn't post the URL.

  • ext3 (Score:2, Insightful)

    by SnapperHead ( 178050 )
    I am running ext3 on all of my machines for a few good reasons. I have ran ReiserFS in the past, but I have switched.
    • ext3 feels more responsive then ReiserFS. This isn't a real benchmark.
    • ext3 supports file attributes. Which is *VERY* important to me. I am kinda pissed off that the most important (well, one of) file attribute is s, this way, if a file is deleted, its contents are zeroed out on the platter. Good for security waykos like me :)
      chattr +a /home/*/.bash_history is a very nice feature.
    • You can mount an ext3 drive on a ext2 system. Theres no converstions that will cause data loss. Plus, it was very simple to get up and running with rh 7.2

    Of course, it has 1 big draw back, its not merged with Linus's kernel. That should be happening soon, I hope.

  • the partitions that are 6 ft. or taller with sound proofing so the music I play does not disturb my other coworkers.

    (heh, there is one in every crowd...and yes, that is me they are talking about)

    Ok, go a head and mod this down as funny.

  • Just a few days ago,

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1621 22 5&mode=nested

    appeared. And the "debate" over file systems has been going on and on. The article I cited above is recent and perhaps not as relevant, but I think a lot of people who wrote replies were both sensible and informative when it came to the merits of the two most available journaling systems for Linux (as is the case with this debate. I don't see a whole lot of chilish flaming.)

  • Some Important Tips to Remember (Score:4, Funny)

    by selectspec ( 74651 ) on Sunday October 28, 2001 @12:21PM (#2489693)
    Ok, here are some tips regarding filesystems.

    • Make sure that whatever filesystem you choose runs with 256 colors.
    • Make sure that you pick a filesystem that has SCSI (or you could hold out for Infiniband).
    • Don't use a floppy drive in conjunction with your hard drives (it slows them down.
    • Don't be afraid to run your web server off of swap space only.
    • Mauve servers are faster than gray, but those new black cases are also pretty good.
    • Be sure that you partition your buffer cache correctly
    • Don't forget to check the syslog for any journal entries that XFS, ext3 or Rieser makes.
    • NFS and SMB are the best filesystems because they minimize your local disk space needs and they are the most reliable and efficient.
    • If you're running linux alway use NTFS
    • Put all of your files in just one directory (/) for performance increases.
  • If we take the "partition" word by it's definition, a hard drive partition would be a way to separate the hard drive into one or more distinct parts. Now, those parts aren't called "partitions"; they are part of the hard drive partition scheme if you like. But we often refer to those parts as partitions which is wrong: a hard drive can be partitionned in only one way at any given time.

    My question is how then should we call those "parts" ?

    Now to answer the filesystem question I would suggest using ReiserFS. I used it for a couple of months with good results and without any problem. It works well also on software raid1...
  • i run a few basic web/ftp servers that get about 1000 hits a day. they run slackware 8.0 with ext2 filesystems. however, if you are expecting a short number of hits, it really doesnt matter what filesystem you use, more it depends on what distribution and what software you are using.
  • if it's a small server (i'm assuming under 5000 page views a day) It won't matter what you go with unless your running off a 486. I'd say just go with one that journals for crash recovery, but if it's a small server you won't notice much of a speed difference
  • My fstab looks something like this (nonrelevant parts snipped)
    /dev/hda3 / ext3
    /dev/hda2 swap swap
    /dev/hdb1 /glftpd/site ext3
    /dev/hda1/ / tmp reiserfs
  • There is probably a reason for the distribution you are installing having a certain filesystem as default :)
  • I work on graphic drivers for Linux, which unfortunatly leads to a lot of system freezes. But i recently changed to ext3 and it has been a major time saver.

  • Partitons and file systems are different. It does not matter waht the partition type is; it is still an array of 512 byte sectors.

    I personly like JFFS. Open source available from IBM. I also like JFFS in conjunction with LVM. LVM is awesome. Its snapshot feature is very useful in backing up active systems.

  • A crypto filesystem? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by magi ( 91730 ) on Sunday October 28, 2001 @01:59PM (#2489899) Homepage Journal
    Is there any stable crypto filesystem for Linux?

    I found a "CFS", but the version was just for kernel 2.2.x. I didn't find a 2.4 port.

    SuSE 7.3 ads say it has a "CryptoFS". Does it work well? Where can I get it, if I don't want to install SuSE?

    An easy-to-use crypto fs would be enormously important especially for laptops in corporate world. I think W2k or XP have some kind of encryption options, and if Linux can't provide a good alternative, it may be a problem in more paranoid companies.

    Of normal filesystems, I've found ReiserFS stable on my two machines during my 6 months of use. I converted from ext2 after it corrupted mysteriously. Unfortunately, RH still doesn't support ReiserFS, even optionally, which I think is really silly. SuSE and Mandrake do.
    • I have been using the SuSE 7.2 crypto file system for some time without any problems. It's no speed demon, but it should be secure. When installed you are prompted for the password while booting up. It should be easy to change so you can enter the password only when you want to.

    • I found a "CFS", but the version was just for kernel 2.2.x. I didn't find a 2.4 port.

      If it's the CFS originally by Matt Blaze, then it should work fine without any kernel support other than NFS client. CFS just runs as a user-mode NFS server. If you can mount an NFS filesystem, you can mount a CFS file system. CFS even works on non-linux systems, such as FreeBSD.

  • My message of peace (Score:3, Funny)

    by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Sunday October 28, 2001 @05:43PM (#2490424) Journal

    Can't we all just thrash along?

    --Blair

  • ReiserFS... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Malor ( 3658 ) on Sunday October 28, 2001 @07:10PM (#2490648) Journal
    Per Red Hat's RHCE training, ReiserFS is explicitly designed for the case of extremely fast access to many small files. It also uses space more efficiently with small files than any other filesystem on Linux, because it is able to glue together the small tails of the files into shared sectors.

    Example: You write a 513-byte file to a filesystem with 512-byte sectors. On other FS types, that file will take 2 sectors. On Reiser, it will take 1 sector plus change. Numerous small files of this type can have their tails packed into the same shared sector. I do not know the overhead in bytes per file, and thus don't know how many tails you can put into a given sector.

    It also handles a very large number of files in the same directory well. Most other FS types have problems if you dump 10,000 files into a directory. It is my understanding that Reiser deals with this extremely well.

    However, there is one drawback. If you are using LILO, the tail packing can cause you much grief. Lilo does not understand tails. It will be unable to execute its own second part or the kernel itself if either has had a tail-pack done. Thus, you should likely use a separate /boot partition, and make that partition ext2 or ext3. Alternately, you can add the 'notails' option to your /etc/fstab file to turn off tail packing. If you aren't using many small files, this will not be a huge loss.

    Mandrake 8.0 came with a 2.2 kernel with ReiserFS backported. DO NOT try to use ReiserFS with any software RAID in any Linux 2.2 kernel. Make sure you update to 2.4. I believe 8.1 comes with 2.4 standard, so it shouldn't be an issue anymore with that distribution.

    There have also been numerous bugfixes in the Reiser code over the 2.4 releases, so you will probably want to go with as recent a kernel as you can. Linus' 2.4 kernel tree has the reputation of being unstable, so you may want to use Alan Cox's branch until the official tree stabilizes better.

  • I'd recommend that you put your data in a ReiserFS logical volume which is part of a volume group spanning two disks, mirrored. And turn off updating the access times for files with '-o noatime' and use SCSI.

    Going mirrored will give the OS the opportunity to get the data from either spindle on reads.

    just my $0.02
  • I don't know which FS is superior, but you might want to sersiously consider using a RAID.
  • After using reiserfs for a year++ and now having switched to xfs, my recommendation is the latter. There is a simple reason to this: reiserfs caches a lot. Even with 512Mb RAM I always ended up with swap after doing a few file transfers, and for a ftp site that is not so good, at least not if you plan to do other things with the computer as well.
    A simple solution is of course to disable swap, but that is only a workaround. Until reiserfs gets a little lighter on caching, my recommendation is definitely xfs.

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