[ale] Ext4 adoption anyone?

Jim Kinney jim.kinney at gmail.com
Fri Jan 23 10:14:42 EST 2009


Adding to this: Recent XFS seems to have destabilised somehow. Unless
you need single file sizes of  4+GB (i.e. pushing digital video files
around), XFS is not a good idea.

JFS actually won a filesystem test in the past year or so for overall
usefulness, speed and reliability. It is a good general purpose
filesystem with a solid journalling system.

EXT3 is quite stable except for a few, odd corner cases. The inability
to recover data inodes from a file deletion is perceived as a bad
thing.

IF (!!) ZFS ever become available as a GPL addition to the kernel, we
will see some useful things happen in filesystems.  ZFS in Solaris is
pretty rock-solid.

FUSE adds it's own layer of 'funk' to the mix. My experience has been
that fuse is mostly reliable. But an unravelling fuse stream can
destabalise mount-point end of the fuse'ed system. The source end
seems to be unaffected. Half-mounted, locked, unable to remount or
remove when it fizzles from 2.6.26 through 2.6.28. I have not decided
if the issue is with fuse or with the stupid gui mounting tools from
gnome (I'd put my money on gnome hosing something first!). Of course
it's not reliably repeatable breakage either.

2009/1/23 Michael B. Trausch <mike at trausch.us>:
> On Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:04:39 -0500
> Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> These newer filesystems, including the ones used through FUSE - are
>> any of them considered as reliable as ext3, jfs, xfs?
>
> I'd imagine that would depend on who you ask.  I've had so-called
> stable filesystems totally nuke my data, and filesystems in
> development that never so much as sneezed for me.
>
> I trust ext4 because of its common code with ext3.  And in fact, ext4
> exposed ext3 to new eyes because there are neophytes out there, and
> bugs were found in ext4 that were inherited from ext3 and then were
> fixed in both.  I trust XFS less than I trust FAT32 because I have
> never had a filesystem nuke my data as completely and efficiently as it
> did back in 2.6.25 days.  I still see people reporting major bugs
> (data loss ranging from small to extreme) in XFS to the kernel mailing
> list, and I personally wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
>
> Looking at my LKML folder today, I see 22 emails on problems with XFS,
> compared to 6 for ext4.  Ted Tso jumped on that thread immediately (the
> ext4 problem, which reported ENOSPC with ~500 MB left on the
> filesystem); turns out the problem is that the user is unable to use
> the very last 1% of their root filesystem, and it's being worked on
> now.
>
> I see nothing on JFS; that could mean that there is nobody using that
> filesystem or that it is virtually bug-free.  Don't know which.  I also
> see nothing for vfat, and 7 messages in 4 threads for btrfs, though
> that is probably because only a few people are attempting to use btrfs
> at this point.
>
> As far as FUSE filesystems go, I haven't used many.  But I do know that
> of the ones I have used (sshfs, WikipediaFS, NTFS-3G, and Captive NTFS)
> I have never had any problems with the FUSE driver itself.  In the case
> of sshfs, the only problem that I have ever had was with the remote
> host dropping the connection after a timeout, which is easily fixed by
> keeping the filesystem active or by just remounting the filesystem.  I
> would like to play more with FUSE since the variety of file systems
> available there is kind of impressive.  The idea of being able to mount
> just about anything is kind of nice, and being in userspace, there may
> be lossage, but there won't be kernel crashes, and that's a big plus.
> That said, I haven't played enough with any single FUSE filesystem in
> order to be able to make any substantial positive claims on it, but it
> hasn't broke yet for me.
>
>        --- Mike
>
> --
> My sigfile ran away and is on hiatus.
> http://www.trausch.us/
>
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III


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