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Which Partition Types Are Superior?
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."
Therefore partition type is quite different from what file system to use.
Besides, wasn't there just a story on Linux Advanced File Systems????
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?
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
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?
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.
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.
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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..
3000 dead over past 2 years, still no free Palestinians, still
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.
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.
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.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I like Reiserfs the best. That's to say: it is fast, is a journal filesystem and it's fast.
/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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
me@mzi.to
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.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
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 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.
Is your company running tools written by ma
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.
"Laugh Quietly- tomorrow is your turn to be rong."
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.
The question asked for information about partitition schema, not file systems. And yet almost every post so far has been about file systems.
h andbook/install-steps.html
/opt, /etc/, /usr/local, and so on, the BSD system is very rigid--there's even a man page about where things belong.)
n ual/ref-guide/ch-partitions.html
/.'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!
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/
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
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-Ma
FYI-- here's some news you won't see on
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.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
chattr +a
Of course, it has 1 big draw back, its not merged with Linus's kernel. That should be happening soon, I hope.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Someone you trust is one of us.
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.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
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.
They have made improvements, and in my experience ext3 is faster than ext2. See for example the Michael Johnson email:
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.
Windows 2000 can't boot off a dynamic drive, because the OS itself only establishes the dynamic volume after it is loaded. Before that time, even to the BIOS, they are seperate drives.
Dynamic Volumes == Software RAID. The data is stored on there, but the partition tables and FAT are so mangled that converting back and forth, or even just removing one of the drives and swapping in another, will render all data across all volumes unreadable.
MSKB has an article about this, I don't remember the number.
JKoebel
Excellent point - a brief google search found this page, a summary of the performance of ext2, ext3, jfs, xfs, vfat, and reiserfs.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Can't we all just thrash along?
--Blair
All of them, once you build a kernel with support and add in the tools you need.
:)
VMWare is pretty cheap and plex86 is free (as is Bochs) if you need to run stability-compromising software as root (create a second account otherwise). Now you can have stability *and* a modern filesystem.
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.
/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.
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
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.
You left unanswered the qusestion of what FAT/NTFS have to do with Registry rot.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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.
Although advanced journaling filesystems only journal metadata, some journaling filesystems journal everything: when a disk write happens, the entire write is written to the journal file, then it's written to the real file, then it's deleted from the journal file.
When Ext3 was first created, it COULD NOT journal metadata -- the only option was full file journaling, which was incredibly slow. Don't tell me I'm wrong, because I read the original release notes which said that metadata journaling was not available yet. I believe that Ext3 can now do metadata-only journaling -- somebody correct me if I'm wrong -- but it's a fairly recent development, within the past year or so.
This mail message from about a year ago says that metadata support was "in an early state" at the time. I don't know if it's been perfected since then or not. But the e-mail proves that at one time, Ext3 could NOT do metadata-only journaling, which flat-out disproves your post that all journaling filesystems only journal metadata.
And RAID quite frankly has nothing to do with it; I can't even imagine why you brought it up because it's absolutely irrelevant.
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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