[NBLUG/talk] Recommendations for journalling filesystems?

[Jeff Coffler]

Lincoln Peters wrote:
> I now know that ReiserFS is not a practical option for a journalling 
> filesystem, if for no other reason due to its inadequate recovery 
> tools (I don't know enough about filesystems to debate any other 
> technical merits it may or may not have).  So I ask my fellow NBLUG 
> members: what journalling filesystems have you used, and which (if 
> any) would you recommend?
I currently run a Fedora Core5 system.

I always run EXT3 (always have since I started running Linux, and EXT3 
was available).  It's the default file system on Fedora (and prior 
Redhat brotheren), so it's very well tested, and it works very reliably.

However, EXT3 works poorly for MythTV.  It turns out that EXT3 is pretty 
poor at deleting very large files.  For test purposes, I tried to delete 
a 20GB file, and EXT3 would generate very heavy disk activity for around 
20 seconds or so.  The the 'rm' command would come back.  Since MythTV 
can routinely generate large files (video is ~ 2GB/hour, assuming no HD 
- HD is bigger), EXT3 is a poor choice for MythTV.  When I redid this 
test on a JFS file system, the identical delete operation would be about 
0.1 seconds.

For MythTV, I've been running JFS on the video partition, and it's 
worked well for me.  This is the recommended file system of choice since 
XFS has some stability issues when used with LVM (so says Jarod's MythTV 
guide, anyway).

In any case, if you're storing standard files, I'd go with EXT3 (unless 
you couldn't for some reason).  It's tried, tested, and proven.  And in 
my experience, it's perfectly reasonable for everyday tasks.  If you're 
doing something different, then more research and/or testing will be 
called for.

    -- Jeff