Reliability of Journalling Filesystems Under Linux?

chrysrobyn asks: "Every write-up I see about journalling file systems under Linux discusses efficiency (embedded) or speed (desktop/server). Have any studies been done on reliability? I've used Linux since Slackware 96 (and kernel 2.0.0), and put it on 9 or 10 machines over the years (Slackware on x86 and Debian on PPC), but I've never strayed from ext2. Always, when the uptime gets high, 20-50 days, the filesystems start to get minor fsck errors. Not that I repair the system and expect it to stay live, I just use the fsck -n to help me decide when a repair is in order. Since the same thing has happened on a variety of hardware (386-PII and every interface in between and 601 and 750 processors with Apple hardware), I'm leaning on blaming the ext2 filesystem for these, the slightest of problems. I typically keep my servers up for as long as possible because 95% of my hardware problems have happened during resets and cold power-ups. It's time for my every-other-year rebuild of my personal server, with another on its way, so I was hoping to incite some anecdotal Slashdot conversation on the journalling file systems available for Linux. Personally, I'm most interested in hearing about the file systems supported under Debian stable for ease of administration for this machine which is a 5 hour drive away from home. I've been around the block a few times, so I'm not fearful of patching the kernel with better patches, but I'm respectful of the work the Debian assurance teams have done."

Comments

Re:Ext3 vs ReiserFS

[JLester]

The more recent ReiserFS is much more stable. We run it on a RAID5 system that serves e-mail for about 7000 users. We use Maildir format mailboxes and ReiserFS is supposed to be really fast for small files. We converted from a dual-550 to a dual-1.26 system and went from ext2 to ReiserFS and noticed a huge speed increase in opening large mailboxes.

Jason

Re:There's more (thanks for crediting me)

[orangesquid]

" This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. "

IBM's Mainframe line of computers kicks WinDOS ass. You can run binaries compiled on slow, clunky 1960's System-360 refrigerators on modern multiprocessing, fault-tolerant, redundant zSeries systems. I can't even run my favorite DOS 5.0 apps under DOS 6.0, least of all under Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. My PC, when it was a DOS machine, had DOS 3.0, DOS 5.0, DOS 6.2, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95. Lots of rebooting to use all my old apps, unless I wanted mysterious crashes and freezes.

Linux can still run QMAGIC executables compiled against BSD libc4 on a modern ELF/glibc2.3 system by turning on a kernel option and copying a few .so files.

My only complaint about Linux compatibility, actually, is just the idiots careless programmers who change the API of their library without changing the major revision number. (*cough QT cough*)