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Why Redhat Choose ext3 For 7.2
mz001b writes "There is an interesting article from RH posted on LinuxToday discussing why they chose ext3 over the other available journaling filesystems (ReiserFS, xfs, jfs,...) for RH 7.2"
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i would have to say they went to ext3 because its the next version up from ext2... duhh...
i cant seem to come up with a sig.
I've worked with ext2, ext3, and ReiserFS extensively, and I can say I've had vastly different results than what many people have _read and repeated_ here. Ext2 is a nice filesystem, assuming you don't have to worry about an unclean shutdown. I can't count the number of times I've lost a filesystem entirely because it was ACTUALLY doing something when the power was lost, or just 2.4's bad VM sending the machine into oblivion and the filesystem with it. Ext3 was nice when I used it once or twice, until I turned DMA on for the disk, at which point it started corrupting itself quite nicely (not a hardware issue, trust me). I would hope this is fixed by now, but I always found it to be a nice feature. ReiserFS, but comparison, has never failed me. I've used it extensively on production machines under 2.2 and 2.4, and been using knfsd since 2.4.6 was released (damn ext2 hooks in the code, completely ridiculous). Obviously, you should find what suits your needs best, but some of the flaming and outright incorrect claims I've seen recently are just ridiculous. See what works for you, not just what RedHat tells you. I remember when Linux was about choice, not about RedHat telling me that I shouldn't use a certain filesystem on my machine and not giving me the CHOICE of doing so.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Realisitcally because;
1- They didn't won't to sit around a coffee table trying to figure out something new.
2- Ext3 sounds like a file name convetion.
3- Ext2 is too old and Ext4 doesn't exist yet.
Well, all I have to say is.... I've used reiserFS for quite a while now.... and I've had some interruptions in power.... causing an unweildly shutdown or two..... and I do have to say that you *can* end up with errors all the same.... so don't trust ext3fs to save your butt....... instead invest in a good backup util *and* get yourself a UPS.
Better safe than sorry they say... it is true.
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
RedHat needs to support "in-house" development, if not for technological reasons, then at least for moral supportive reason. Team-building and stuff, you know.
Just convert a clean ext3 back to ext2 then?
Since Slash 2.2 supports journals I don't see why they didn't use that instead!
... ok wait ...
:)
euh
bad bad taste
why did they choose to use ext3 ?
ofcourse its the migration path. Users can choose to install ext3 and later if they want to they can choose to go back to ext2. forward and backwards compatiblity makes ext3 a much more friendly jouraling filesystem for businesses. Some of the intranet servers cannot risk to backup and hope the new filesystem to go up working alright. Ofcourse there are better journaling filesystems out there. But the choice to use ext3 is good one since, its mature,stable and easier to administrate and use. Easier to administrate and use the keywords here. Any kernel out there can read an ext3 partition without extra modules. So it definitely plays well with others. Is there any other journaling filesystem that can say this ?
NS1.INTERNET.COM seems to be having DNS issues.
Ext3 isn't even in the official kernel, but ReiserFS is, and has been for a long time. Yet RedHat is still "protecting" its users from using ReiserFS during an install, which is complete bullshit. It's a test filesystem, tried and true.
The same could be said for ext2, really... but the idea is that after an "unclean" shutdown you don't have to wait as long for a disk check... at least that's what I look to either reiserFS or EXT3 for... When you start looking at really large disk arrays - ext2 fsck takes a helluva long time.
Yes, backups and a UPS are alway necesary for mission critical stuff... but this adds another layer of 'help'.
BlackNova Traders
I mean... I was really pully for NTFS, I wasn't expecting ext3 to even be in the running...
I assume that since ext3 only adds journaling to ext2, reiser is "faster" than ext3 also.
Again this is the claim of reiser people.
Let's see...
/.'ed, but...)
RedHat came up with ext3. Alan Cox works for RedHat. AC has already made patches to the kernel for ext3.
Hmmm... the math isn't tough for this one.
(Granted I haven't read the article, it seems to be
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Migration is indeed very important.
I once tried creating a boot disk which supports ReiserFS in order to fix a broken linux machine, and couldn't find anything like that ANYWHERE. I didn't have any linux machine near me, so I couldn't create one myself...
At least ext3 will not have that problem.
-- The ballad of arrivederci
I would love to read that article, but, since LinuxToday uses fixed-size tables, I quickly grew tired of left-right scrolling just to get to read a single line of text.
Even if I resize the window, the whole page doesn't fit on my screen.
Who the hell let the monkey design the website?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
... since Alan Cox (@redhat.com) had so many arguments over the Linux kernel Mailing List with Hans Reiser.
This thread is a good example.
I'm impressed that you were able to write that long paragraph in the three minutes since the article was posted, let alone read the message linked-to. But, I think that in your hurry, you missed a few key things, so I thought I'd quote them here for your benefit and the benefit of anyone else in too much of a rush:
Red Hat is just telling you what they think works -- not taking away any of your choices. They even ship the reiserfs tools. Perhaps you've fallen to the whole "Red Hat is too popular to be cool" thing?
From: Michael K. Johnson
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 17:53:08 -0400
I wrote up a short piece that I hope to flesh out a bit more later on why Red Hat chose to include ext3 in this release, why you want to use it, and what we did to make it robust.
Its not an anti-any-other-filesystem tirade at all. Dont take any part of it as meant to put down any other filesystem, even ones we have not chosen to ship yet. No hidden agenda involving alien abductions... :-)
Anyway, I hope its useful. Feedback to the list [ roswell-list@redhat.com -ed. ], please.
michaelkjohnson
"He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book." Linux Application Development -- Ben Franklin
http://people.redhat.com/johnsonm/lad/
Why do you want to migrate from ext2 to ext3? Four main reasons: availability, data integrity, speed, and easy transition.
Availability:
After an unclean system shutdown (unexpected power failure, system crash), each ext2 file system cannot be mounted until its consistency has been checked by the e2fsck program. The amount of time that the e2fsck program takes is determined primarily by the size of the file system, and for todays relatively large (many tens of gigabytes) file systems, this takes a long time. Also, the more files you have on the file system, the longer the consistency check takes. File systems several hundreds of gigabytes in size may take an hour or more to check. This severely limits availability.
By contrast, ext3 does not require a file system check even after an unclean system shutdown, except for certain rare hardware failure cases (e.g. hard drive failures), because the data is written to disk in such a way that the file system is always consistent. The time to recover an ext3 file system after an unclean system shutdown does not depend on the size of the file system or the number of files; rather, it depends on the size of the "journal" used to maintain consistency. The default journal size takes about a second to recover (depends on the speed of the hardware).
Data integrity:
Using the ext3 file system can provide stronger guarantees about data integrity in case of an unclean system shutdown. You have a choice of how carefully to protect your data. Essentially, you can choose either to keep the file system consistent but allow for damage to data on the file system in the case of unclean system shutdown (for a modest speed up under some but not all circumstances) or to ensure that the data is consistent with the state of the file system (which means that you will never see garbage data in recently-written files after a crash.) The more safe choice to keep the data consistent with the state of the file system is the default.
Speed:
Despite writing some data more than once, ext3 is often faster (higher throughput) than ext2 because ext3s journaling optimizes hard drive head motion. You can choose from three journaling modes to optimize speed, optionally choosing to trade off some data integrity. One mode, data=writeback, limits the data integrity guarantees, allowing old data to show up in files after a crash, for a potential increase in speed under some circumstances. This mode, which is the default journaling mode for most journaling file systems, essentially provides the more limited data integrity guarantees of the ext2 file system and merely avoids the long file system check at boot time. The second mode, data=ordered (the default mode), guarantees that the data is consistent with the file system: recently-written files will never show up with garbage contents after a crash. The last mode, data=journal, requires a larger journal for reasonable speed in most cases and therefore takes longer to recover in case of unclean shutdown, but is sometimes faster for certain database operations. The default mode is recommended for all general-purpose computing needs.
Easy transition:
It is easy to change from ext2 to ext3 and gain the benefits of a robust journaling file system, without reformatting. Thats right, no need to do a long, tedious, and error-prone backup, reformat, restore operation in order to experience the advantages of ext3. There are two ways to do the transition:
A list of reasons Red Hat chose ext3 for our first supported journaling file system follows. Note that these reasons are not necessarily each unique to ext3 (some other journaling file systems share several of the points here) but the whole set of reasons taken together is unique to ext3.
Again, we dont claim that every one of these points are unique to ext3. Most of them are shared by at least one other filesystem. We merely claim that the set of all of them together is true only for ext3.
Here are some of the things Red Hat has done to ensure that ext3 is safe for users to use for their data:
I've been interested in upgrading the FS on the machines I manage here in the office, give or take about 15 servers. The fact of the matter is that it is no small job bringing down a production machine to change its filesystem. So, it sits with an unjournaled ext2 fs. Which is where it would sit, potentially forever until it left the production scope. The ability to upgrade the FS to ext3 without even a reboot, AND maintaining the security of being able to roll back those changes are more than enough to convince me that this is the best way to go.
If I push to have the systems upgraded, say to ReiserFS, and something goes wrong. I'm just plain f**ked. It's that simple. This offers me the ability to upgrade with a fraction of the risk. Which, considering RedHats duties to its customers, I think is the perfect decision.
Aaron
AaronCameron.net
So I read the article, and all of those reasons could easily apply to any of the above filesystems. Never mind that all of them are more mature and more stable than ext3. The only technical argument for ext3 is the upgrade path: ext3 is ext2 with a journal. But the real reason might be that RH can speed adoption (and by the bazaar model, improvement) of ext3, developed at RedHat, this way.
Actually, it wasn't a monkey. It was an 8 year old with Downs Syndrome.
And do an NT machine while you're at it; it wouldn't do to be seen as biased or anything.
Not administrate. Administer. Administrate is a word that uneducated people began using in sufficient quantities to make other people think it was a real word, even to the point of fooling some dictionaries into including it.
More importantly, who's letting the monkey browse the website? You can't read!
After an unclean system shutdown (unexpected power failure, system crash)...
Power failures have been known to occur sometimes, but I've never had Linux crash.
The article at LinuxToday isn't about RedHat prefering ext3 over other journaling filesystems. It's merely an explaination of why they decided to include ext3 in the new RedHat 7.2.
The only comparison made is between ext3 and ext2 where they explain the advantages of a journaling system.
This site seems to be slashdotted.
The guy from Atheos (http://www.atheos.cx/) calls Slashdotting " The worst mass attack I have ever seen". Because this seems to be a continual (and somewhat legendary) problem, I think the powers that be (Taco et al) should put a system in place wherein they give sysadmins some sort of warning before they post a slashdot article which could take down their website with a "Friendly DDOS".
As Spiderman says, "With great power comes great responsibility", and Slashdot's power to strain system resources is very great, indeed.
Linux has never crashed on me without a hardware problem causing it (not an exaggeration), but that doesn't mean we haven't had plenty of hardware problems, and each time there was a failure, the fsck would take 30-45 minutes. My first thought was ext3, but... heh. It was always grayed out in the kernel config menus. Not a good sign. ReiserFS on the other hand was immediately available.
Of course, you don't trust your data to something without being damn thorough about it, so I did a bunch of tests on staging servers (which went great) and I spent a lot of time reading Hans Reiser, who impressed me considerably as a smart person with a lot of good ideas. We made the move this spring and have had zero problems with the filesystem during normal operations. Zero. It's blazing fast on our tests, it appears to scale beautifully, and if I go down, I have no wait time anymore coming back up.
Of course, I keep up with the kernel changes and upgrade when I see updates relevant to the filesystem.
It's not a perfect package, but nearly. Its consistency checker/repair tool (reiserfsck) is not finished (as its messages vigorously warn). Now, remember, this is not the same thing as e2fsck. You are not using it in the same role, its purpose is much more specialized (disaster recovery), so the significance is different. Still; we came to use it during several of the many times high-speed SCSI chomped on our asses and corrupted data. We have backups, of course, but I wanted to see what the tool was capable of. In several cases it was able to successfully rebuild the filesystem, very slowly, with --rebuilddb, but in several other cases, the tool would dump core, which, if you were one of those fools without a backup, would leave you stranded.
Even in this, however, I was reassured; the maintainer of the tool answers emails quickly and was eager to try to troubleshoot the problem. I thus have no doubt that it will quickly mature into something quite good. It's just not there at this moment.
On the whole I would say I'm extremely happy with ReiserFS; we've punished it here pretty brutally and it's passed every test. I don't have any experience with ext3, but anecdotally I'm told it's less mature. Still, I have nothing against it. I can only comment that I hope Redhat's upgrade process from 7.1 to 7.2 will at least take reiserfs into account, instead of breaking the way it did from 7.0 to 7.1.
We're on the road to Tycho.
I'm suprised that more people haven't said anything about XFS. I've been using for awhile now at home and on a production fileserver at work for awhile now and haven't experienced any problems. The only thing at all that has been a worry is the fact that Grub can not yet read XFS, so you have to create a small boot drive at the beginning. At least with XFS, the filesystem has already been designed and tested for years by SGI, and the only matter was porting it to Linux. From what I've seen with ReiserFS, they are still trying to decide on features and on how it is going to go about doing things. That's fine and all, but I don't want to end up having to backup and restore my filesystem a few times as they decide to impliment a new "everything and the kitchen sink" feature. If I'm doing something for file integrity and security, I'd rather have something that I know has been working for years now in a high performance environment. Just so this won't be considered offtopic, I would say that I can see why ext3 would be preferred by Redhat over Reiser (with the in-house development, and the easier migration), and hey, it will probably be "good enough" for most people (and certainly some kind of journaling is better than plain ext2), so hey, good for Redhat, and good for their users. I'll continue using XFS, but that's what's nice about choice anyway, right?
No, it's 'choosed'. Why RedHat Choosed ext3 For 7.2
(Yes, it's chose. Perhaps they'll fix it sometime.)
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
I wonder which type of fs linuxtoday has, /. trouble.
because it seems to be in a little
A one banana problem.
1 reason and 1 reason only they didn't go with reiser. NIH. Not Invented Here. Pridefull tech companies like Intel are notorious for this. Too bad for all involved.
I use Partition Magic on a regular basis to manage my partitions, resizing and moving them around as needed. (I know, it's commercial software, but it's one of the more useful pieces of commercial software out there, especially if you like to change things around a lot on your systems.)
PM supports ext2 but not any of the newer exotic journaling file systems like ReiserFS or xfs.
The fact that ext3 is comatable with ext2, and can be converted back and forth is a welcome feature for those who use PM to manage their partitions.
I don't see what all the complaints about ext3 are - there doesn't seem to be any reason about.
People like to have choice - RedHat is simply adding a lot more choice open to the public. Surely this is a good thing, is it not ?
From what I've heard, ext2 is really easy to deal with, is a delight to write low-level (such as perl or python). By including it in the distribution, RedHat are offering not only to the consumer but to the developer as well.
As it is, ext2 is widely used in other Liunx distro's, so what's the problem ? It means that if you decided to change distro's to RedHat then you'd no longer have to do a backup and reformat all your drives. No! Your old linux installation running ext2 will now be able to be read by RedHat.
Admitedly there are a few problems with ext2 - such as if you suffer from a power failure and say you have an eighty-gig drive... that's gonna take a *long* time to check. This is not good.
I just can't wait until ext3 is finally out - but who knows how long it'll take RedHat to come up with it ? Hopefully not as long as it's taken them to start supporting ext2!
i dual boot
if i want to read linux files from windows i have only one tool at my disposal and its called explore2fs. this tool is very useful to me and would not choose lightly to change my linux filesystem.
for standalone linux machines this is not even an issue.
(dont suggest VMware i dont want to pay for it so i simply wont use it)
There's an interesting review of different file systems here
I use NTFS and love it ;)
If rumors are true that Microsoft is seeking to replace NTFS with SQL Server providing the 'file system manager, registry, etc.' in whatever follows Windows XP, perhaps Linux also move towards a user filesystem based on a database, like Sybase, Oracle, DB2 or Postgres? (Ding) Wait...Red Hat buys into Postgres...hmmm... Isolating kernal filesystem from user 'filesystem'...hmmm. I wonder if IBM or Sybase would like to contribute towards this? Then a Linux user gets database'd filesystem of choice vs. a one size DBFS fits all from Mygrossoftware?
BTW, people can get more information about XFS, or download patches or kernel source from the SGI Linux XFS site. CVS is also available.
we have had been using Reiserfs in production, on servers (both inhouse and on my client sites), on desktops, laptops, raid, FC raids etc for about 2 years. Never had a problem with it, even when using NFS.
Most client sites have had been up for a few months without any problems.
So, ext3 might make into those sites who only install what is on the distribution, but wont replace ReiserFS, which was there first(when it was needed) so easily.
BTW, SuSE has been shipping Reiserfs for more than a year now on their distributions. Current versions allow you to put root disk as well as others on ReiserFS.
Oh and please dont talk about the migration path issues (loosing old data etc).
Migrating from anything to anything else require backups, backups, backups and redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.
Example: If I have to move from ext2 to reiser, I will just create a second partition/volume, format it with the new filesystem, and use that without touching/destroying the old system so I can fallback to it.
Oh and IMHO the reason to put ext3 instead of Reiser/JFS/XFS as default is the same like putting Gnome instead of KDE as the default DE.
Well something has to be default.
I have read the article and I could read the benifits of ext3 over ext2 but didnt read any benifits of ext3 over anyOtherJournalingFS.
--
If Microsoft is the solution, I want my problems back
Thank you. That was entertaining.
=)
and they want to define what Linux is. That's not so hard to understand.
Yes, I'm a Linux user, yes, I have it pre-loaded onto computers I buy for work and will sing it's virtues all day long, but RedHat is still a company and does have to make money. If they've tested the filesystems and one type works better for what Redhat needs in a filesystem, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out which filesystem they're going to use.
The good news is that you can have a dozen filesystems on your hard drive and mount each and every one of them and not have to worry about which one is what when it comes time to go to that directory.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
Here's my reasoning:
* Any non-trivial choice in the computer world has its pros and cons.
* Magically, Michael Johnson only finds pros in adopting ext3.
Conclusion: Michael Johnson is not fully confronting the issue or being fully objective and upfront.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
ext2 - hmmm, too cold.
ReiserFS - mmmm... too hot.
ext3 - mmmmm.... Ah! Just right!
Both at home, and at work, running various versions of the 2.2 kernel plus patches, stock Mandrake installs, 2.4 kernel, etc. we have, over time, experienced data loss using reiserfs. This has not been limited to one machine, or one configuration, or one version of the filesystem (though, admittedly, we have been unwilling to try any newer versions in the last six months or so ... let someone else take the pain for a while).
... at least for the nonce. I concur with another poster who pointed out that SGI's XFS has been well tested and stable since 1994 ... any issues are porting issues, not design or internal issues, which IMHO is quite important when looking for a managable and stable alternative.
I say this not to knock reiser per se (I am quite happy it made it into the kernel tree, although I won't be completely happy until ext3, jfs, and xfs are all in the kernel tree as well so that they can compete with one another on quality and features rather than merely convinience), but to point out that all is not necessarilly sunny, nor is it unequivocably the "leader" when it comes to Linux journalling filesystems. I feel it is important to counterbalance some of these overly sunny depictions of experimental filesystems being used in serious environments with a little real-world, personal experience to the contrary.
I haven't yet tried ext3 or jfs, but have used various incarnations of xfs and must say that I have developed a preference for it over the last few weeks. That having been said, I still make use of ext2 filesystems in production environments and will only use less tried linux filesystems (previously reiser, now ext3 and xfs) in development/test environments only
These filesystems are fun and exciting, but they are not perfect, and in the case of reiser some rather serious (hopefully now fixed, but what's next?) flaws have gotten played down a little more than they should have. Remember, back up early, back up often, and be conservative in using any of them in anything other than a test situation (you can, once its tested to your satisfaction, but be cautious).
Back up early and back up often.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Given that many of the improvements they release don't get included into distributors' realeases and that they've release "patched" ISO versions of RH 7.1 etc. already.
How long 'til an official SGI-Linux distro? Or how logn 'til SGI buys a Linux distro company - (assuming they have the cash).
=WHY CARE WHICH???=
Once you've formatted the partition, and loaded the appropriate FS driver, you don't =NEED= to care what the underlying filesystem is. There is NO DIFFERENCE!
From the perspective of Red Hat, or any other distribution, the difference in effort of supporting one journalling FS or a hundred is negligable. A menu is a menu is a menu. The number of items on it is irrelevent.
From the perspective of the user, it doesn't make a difference, either. Oh, it's a pull-down menu! Wow! Never seen one of those before, I wonder how it works. Duh! Give even novice users the wits to ignore things they don't understand, and expert users the freedom to tweak things they DO understand. Futher, since ALL filing systems behave in much the same way, from the user's standpoint, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference whether someone "messes up" on this or not.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I did not see any mention on the article on whether other journaling file systems would be available on Red Hat 7.2 as part of the installation/upgrade procedure.
;-)
I am have been using ReiserFS for about 18 months now and greatly appreciate it on my 20 gig hard drive on my laptop. Never had a single corruption problem, and always rebooting the machine quickly (specially with VMware crashing the system
Some systems at Ximian use XFS extensively as well. When you have too many files in a directory (for example Gnus spools) ext2/ext2 wont cut it due to the slow operations on directories with lots of files.
Miguel.
With ext2 you can use the ext2 debugger to mark bad blocks after the creation of a file system. You can't do this with Reiserfs without a lot of work, and then the fix is only temporary until you run fsck. Ext2 has a absolutely wonderful debugger that you can use to edit and modify the file system. This is really really helpful if your disk develops bad blocks. Additionally, Ext2 supports various useful file attributes like immutable file status. Reiserfs does not support file attributes.
Despite the lack of journalling in Ext2, I would term it a robust file system. Reiserfs may retain its integrity in the event of a crash, but I would not call it robust. It is in many ways more fragile than ext2, particularly in the area of dealing with hardware failures.
What do I do? I use ext2 for / and Reiserfs for everything else.
I propose a contest to see who comes up with the best and wittiest reply to this comment. Highest score wins. (suggested because, as I read it, I come to a complete loss)
Maybe you didn't realize that all three are still bears and will chase you out of the house, or worse... eat you for lunch. I'm waiting on IBM's LVM/JFS in Linux to reach critical mass myself.
... ext3 is forwards and backwards compatible with ext2, allowing users to keep existing file systems while very simply adding journaling capability. Any user who wishes to un-journal a file system can do so easily. (Not that we expect many to do so...)
Actually I want to do so. Anyone knows how to convert back to ext2? I installed 2.4.9 on Roswell but kernel don't recognizes ext3. I've checked tune2fs(8) and everything in e2fsprogs.rpm and still can not find this info.
GRUB doesn't work with ANYTHING. Use LILO.
Hmm this will be interesting. My machine has had a few unexpected shutdowns, and I have had to run fsck on them. With a 30 GIg drive it actually was faster than with my old system. Of course it helps that I have a super fast computer these days (1.2Gighz with WD 7200RPM drive). I'd imagine that soon I can have my dream of instant on / instant off machine ;-).
Only 'flamers' flame!
Nice flame!
RedHat has been VERY good about not radically changing their platform between point releases so I'm not surprised to see this incremental filesystem improvement.
I would, however, be surprised to see them skip XFS, JFS or ReiserFS in their 8.0 release. It would make sense for them to add that capability at that time (and would allow the implementations to mature that much more).
-- James
James
Hey, Ext3 may be your choice on technical grounds, but Reiser FS has something Ext will never have - major coolness!!!!
$ ls
.
..
script
$ chmod 700 script
$
File Not Found
Yet, ls still finds the file... This is a phantom problem I have only seen on RaiserFS and appears to be some sort of metadata corruption. It is really irritating because you have to create another file. To the credit of RaiserFS, the problem has not occurred since I upgraded to SuSE 7.1.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
BSD has soft updates, which perform better than journaling fs. When will linux get soft updates?
They should change it to
;)
Why Redhat Choo-Choo-Choose ext3 for 7.2
and replace the Red Hat logo with a picture of a train
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
A filesystem like reiser/ext3/xfs is only designed to guarantee the internal consistency of the filesystem and metadata after a power failure. No guarantees are made about the data itself.
Contrary to popular misunderstanding, using a journaled filesystem does not mean you can start using the power switch before doing a proper shutdown -- try this and you will lose data on any filesystem. It's just that on the journaled filesystems, the risk of further filesystem corruption as a result of power failure is drastically reduced and there is no long delay to analyze the entire filesystem for consistency when powering up again.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Allusion is made in the article to the future use of NVRAM for the journal. Now, I know how much a performance win this would be, but doesn't NetApp hold a patent on that?
Can someone with more patent-searching skills than myself verify? Thanks!
(Sorry if I be a little short-sentenced. I just wrote a whole story then Mozilla went nuts so now I am doing it again.)
;-), and that, as a result, journaling and devfs will really become mainstream when 2.5 is in good sight. So while 2.4 was supposed to bring us these two big features, in reality, well, it doesn't. Yes, I know, it provides the basis, is being worked on, can be obtained by patches etc. etc., but that doesn't practically make it much difference from 2.2, because as I said, for what I guess, most people still aren't encouraged to take the step to a journaling filesystem.
;-)
Two things: First, with 2.4 we were `promised' journaling and devfs. Both are still marked experimental, and of journaling, only ReiserFS is included as an appetizer, but the subsystem is still heavily in development. Some smaller things that were supposed to be improved at 2.4 are also still marked experimental. My guess is that most people -like me- are still using ext2 and device nodes, silently but eagerly waiting until journaling and devfs (and these other smaller things) get marked `stable' (by the proper authorities
Second: think GCC-2.96 (IIRC). RedHat has the power to shape the Free Software market a little bit the way they like it. With the inclusion of the compiler marked as GCC-2.96 they have practically released a GCC version without involving the GCC team. When RedHat issues a kernel that does ext3 (not just as an option, but as a default feature), I guess at least some of the results are the same as with the GCC-2.96 case. Although maybe this time not `faced with the facts' (that RedHat issued GCC-2.96), but merely `by popular demand' (from other distro's that want to use journaling by now), there will be some pressure on other distro's and the kernel developers to get journalining in.
Hmm. Maybe I'm really exaggerating the case. And do keep in mind that I'm not mad that I don't `get what I'm promised' or something like that. It just makes me nervous that I can't find ext3 anywhere in my fresh kernel sources (2.4.7; debian testing doesn't have 2.4.8 yet but I don't think the differences are that big wrt journaling and `marked experimental' stuff AFAIK from the changelogs) while the ext3 patches for the 2.2 series _are_ in the distro. And I really can use that stable VM of 2.4; earlier on the GIMP crashed my box, now it just crashes itself when loading huge things. I do get complete keyboard blocks once in a while, but no trashing anymore, and hey, that's what the reset button was built for, right?
Which brings us back to journaling.... Oh well
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Well, let's see... I might like to choose to install a system with Reiser, XFS, JFS, and I think that I'll take a little LVM with that, if that would be ok...
What? No XFS? No JFS? No LVM? Where is the choice here?
Red Hat is first a server OS, and they should provide a server-class filesystem. Based on benchmarks I've seen, ext3 doesn't cut it.
Red Hat's claims that Reiser goes corrupt are falling on increasingly deaf ears. Oracle dumped everybody but SUSE (Reiser and LVM), and you can be sure that Oracle has stress-tested ad-infinitum.
In the halcyon days of yore, Red Hat was first to market with glibc, and their steadfast refusal to integrate KDE forced TrollTech to open Qt.
This is no longer the Red Hat of high ideals and great technology. They have lost it, and I am migrating.
Not 100% on topic, but somewhat related: The second beta has been released yesterday. You can get it at ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/roswell /.
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I would hope that this has been addressed by ext3. I recall that this is a major drawback of ext2.
This is necessary...life, feeds on life...
at work, we use reiserFS on mandrake boxes (raid5). we export lots of partitions out to workstations, use NIS and AMD extensively. not one problem.
at home, i've been playing with the latest redhat beta of 7.2, with ext3. i'm actually impressed with ext3 so far, i mean, it feels like ext2 with journaling features... i had a symbolic link disappear a few times, but not sure if that was a result of the filesystem, hmm.
and in the car, i'm using SGI's XFS for my mp3 player. it's a full blown box with lots of hard drive space and a sound card. i turn the machine on and off about 3 to 5 times a day.
this machine is never shut down properly, but XFS doesn't seem to mind. not one problem.
end result? i've used reiserfs, ext3 and xfs and i don't have one complaint with either of them.
Probably two years from now at Debian's pace.
When Redhat 7.1 was released, someone here on slashdot wondered why reiser was not part of the distro. A redhat employee posted that under certian conditions with heavy file i/o tests, the filesystem became corrupted. I am sure the bug is not very common but on a corporate server it should not be installed. The article has been slashdotted so I have no idea what it said about rieser or the other filesystems but I assume that the other filesystems were not fully tested enough with the linux kernel so were not included.
Also remember that redhat is made and used for bussiness oriented servers and workstations where stability and reliability over cutting edge technology is very important. I would not want to bet my job on a new technology until its very matured. Redhat needs to take it slow due to their market. You can always use a more bleeding edge distro like mandrake. Also reiser is available on the Redhat Powertools cd with the deluxe or server edition of RH 7.1 if you just have to have it.
PS: Could someone posting anonymously post the story so I could read it. Thanks
http://saveie6.com/
The only resolution I could come up with was to recreate a new file. It was limited to our ReiserFS / partition, and was most common with the rc.d scripts. This was a major headache and I decided that the journal did give some advantages but at that time (SuSE 7.0) was not ready for prime time, as it added additional ways things could go wrong.
This problem had a habit of preventing certain important services from starting because the metadata for the startup scripts would become corrupt. It was an issue for us, and it has not made us very favorable towards ReiserFS. In fact it prevented further migration.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Your info is so '90s. (: (:
These days it is possible to re-mount a root partition without rebooting, thanks to the pivot_root() system call. It's not easy, mind. You have to have a spare partition big enough to hold the root fs (try deactivating a swap partition temporarily) and you most definitely have to know what you are doing....
There may be some fun and games with re-mounting other fs's to move their mount points back and forth. I don't remember if pivot_root() takes care of that or not.
Obviously I wouldn't recommend doing this -- it's so much easier just to reboot -- but at least it's possible!
ftp://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/download/Release
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
The chief architecht being a redhat employee would it?
Exactly what I thought after clicking 'Submit'.
Congrats for beating me to it.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Grub sucks like a faggot kneeling in a puddle of urine in a bus station restroom, giving blow jobs to sailors as they pass through town on the way to San Diego.
I will not use an FS unless it works on my platform. I use both x86 and SPARC, and I see no reason to make the machines have different file systems. If I wanted a different configuration for each platform, I'd use the native OS for those machines.
If someone knows how to work with ext2, it's a fair bet they can work with ext3.
-twb
Is there still a two gig max file size limitation? I'm assuming so, since this seems to mainly be ext2fs with journaling tacked onto it.
You can get the ext3 patch for 2.4.x at
.deb kernel-image. I've been using ext3 on a 2.2.17 kernel for about a year now on my network dignostic laptop, and usually shut it down with the power switch. I shut my ext3 desktop down properly because it runs a database as well.
http://www.uow.edu.au/~andrewm/linux/ext3/
I downloaded the 2.4.9 last night and made a
My new laptop will have debian-testing and I'm looking at having the power switch APM event run a script which:
Log off terminal sessions
Stop mysql, apache
Unmount NFS
sync
poweroff
This should shut the machine down in less than 5 seconds, with no data loss. The other way is to use the sleep or suspend-to-disk options, but if they don't work, I'll use the above method.
Cheers, glen.
astfgl@iamntota.org
Redhat says ext3 is great, one post here says ReiserFS is even better, another one tells us XFS works like a charm.
:)
The future for Linux JFS's looks bright.
Can you hear me, Major Tom? I'm not the man they think I am at home...
I use ulimit -S -v 400000 to limit the virtual memory size of any one process to ~400MB on my machine with 512MB of RAM, and a bit of swap. This way, if a program decides to eat memory like crazy, it will be stopped before it can deprive any other processes of memory. This way, netscape dies, instead of init. :)
/etc/profile, where everyone gets it. It won't cause trouble for anyone, because those who need to can override it.
I'm writing a program to do physics simulations (soap froth systems, BTW), and if I goof up and give it command line options that would make it thrash, it effectively runs out of memory _before_ it can make the system thrash.
Since I only set a soft limit, I can jack it up without having to be root or anything. Thus, this is a good thing to put in
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
the last thing SGI has is cash, there in a financial situation and some really smart people in there who have solid jobs are worrying, sigh, i'd hate to see them become a victim of all this .com crap
One point that hasn't showed up in the discussion is: Does your backup program recognize the file system ? I tried out ext3, JFS and XFS and ext3 was the only one I could backup with TSM/ADSM . All others were simply ignored. If I run a production server, I rather do backups regularly (and automated) and I will choose a file system, that the program finds and is able to backup.
>> Probably two years from now at Debian's pace.
Since Taco, Etal are debian fans it's no surprise this hasn't been modded up. But it's true.
I personally think that the reasons for chosing ext3 (besides upgrade options) are the same ones that let RH promote Gnome against KDE: the wish to remain in the drivers seat. They even will prefer to drive a car which might be somewhat slower as long as they can use the steering wheel.
This was the main reason I switched from RH to Debian some time ago. More freedom, less compu-nannies who want to prescribe you what to use, less share holder value.
All you Reiser fans (like me) check out:
http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/
These awesome developers are keeping Red Hat in ReiserFS. Almost immediately they release at least an update disk, which will give you the option for ReiserFS, then they release the ISO images with once a good number of security release have been put out, as well as the latest kernel. I depend on these guys since my company won't support Ext3 commercially, only Reiser and XFS.
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
I spent three week tracking down a bug in my code that would kill the box every time it ran...
One has to ask whether SGI will survive long enough to deliver its own Linux version. As Caldera didn't find salvation in Linux as might SGI.