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Preferred file systems under Linux?

5.00 star(s)
I think there are some licensing issues with zfs, I think its only possible to run it outside the kernel. though I have heard there are some ports going on so maybe one day.

Yeah, anything better than LVM.

zFS runs under Unix System Services on z/OS and is basically the replacement for HFS however I think its a different zfs. I've nearly always used ext3 but am slowly moving to ext4 on Linux and seen no problems yet. Used reiserfs once and it screwed up my whole system.
 
zFS runs under Unix System Services on z/OS and is basically the replacement for HFS however I think its a different zfs. I've nearly always used ext3 but am slowly moving to ext4 on Linux and seen no problems yet. Used reiserfs once and it screwed up my whole system.

best stay away from reiserfs - not only is it designed for small files - it doesn't really journal properly so you're toast if the system crashes. Plus the creator is now serving a sentence for murder so its now officially dead. (the project and his victim).
 
best stay away from reiserfs - not only is it designed for small files - it doesn't really journal properly so you're toast if the system crashes. Plus the creator is now serving a sentence for murder so its now officially dead. (the project and his victim).

The murder bit puts me off too. But I used it circa 2000 and it nicely got around the ext3 problem of running fsck every n boots. I was dual booting with Windows in those days so reboots were unavoidable and with the speed of 1999 hardware it was a very real interruption to the workflow.

I tried Solaris yesterday and managed to avoid the dual boot problems of the past by altering the boot device priority in the BIOS. No sound though, so I tried again with Linux Mint and that produced no sound either. A new sound card is maybe on the cards (pardon the pun), but I need to do a bit of digging first.

It appears that jfs2 and xfs are supported on Linux nowadays.

On another note, I ended up working too late on this last night and somehow knacked the Windows setup. Into recovery mode this afternoon and Windows Repair cheerfully wiped out my Ultimate installation. I thought I'd seen this behaviour when I was mucking around with dual boot stuff several months ago but couldn't prove it. Another nail in the MS coffin here; you simply don't need to get into this type of hassle on a non-Windows system.

This is where being paranoid about testing backups to make sure they really work pays off, of course. ;)
 
Last edited: 15:09
Just been reading up on Btrfs (butter FS) and it is essentially zfs from Oracle with a GPL licence. I should be incorporated into the newer distro soon. However it will be beta for sometime. Probably couldn't use it until 2012.
 
Just been reading up on Btrfs (butter FS) and it is essentially zfs from Oracle with a GPL licence. I should be incorporated into the newer distro soon. However it will be beta for sometime. Probably couldn't use it until 2012.

Yep, I'm looking forward to that.

Thread update:

  • Neither ext4 nor xfs provide atomic file renames (and apparently this has caused the Mozilla developers some headaches).
  • I am running jfs on a backup disk. The problem here is that on a boot I sometimes have to do a repair before the system can see the disk.
  • Currently using ext3 on top of LVM. Using data=ordered rather than writeback, going to try the journalled option this weekend.
Linus Torvalds Upset over Ext3 and Ext4- Linux Magazine Online
 
ext3 is what i am using on most my stuff now

zfs had promise and i even deployed it for a few clients over the last few years, though that was for solaris boxes. but given oracles utter shambles of it's handling with some of sun's cool tech, i have written it off

btrfs is the upcoming favorite, and the theodore tso' architect of ext3 and 4 has said that ext4 is just a stopgap and btrfs is the way forward.
 

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