ianw1974 Posted November 4, 2005 Report Share Posted November 4, 2005 I've been using Mandrake/Mandriva a while now, but googling around doesn't really shed any light on what's best. I know by default, that ext3 is the chosen file system unless you change otherwise. On all my systems, I've always used SGI's XFS, but am unsure of whether I have the best file system. I only tend to use them as desktop environments. I know that reiserfs and xfs are supposed to be better than ext3, and that they are all journaling file systems. But what's best? I read somewhere that xfs is supposed to be better for large files, but uses too much memory handling smaller files. Am I better using reiserfs instead? The reason I ask, is because I recently built an LE2005 system, and am having weird problems with it. I have 1GB of RAM, and find I nearly run out of memory! The system has a 19GB root partition (xfs), 1GB swap (I know, it doesn't have to be this big), and a 160GB home partition (xfs). If anyone can help me understand this a bit further, and explain a little about the filesystems, I'd be well happy :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted November 4, 2005 Report Share Posted November 4, 2005 You seem to have summed it up well! XFS is deisnged for streaming media ... something SGI excel in but its downside is it uses very agressive caching by default. You need bags of mem AND it is a little dangeous in case of a power out etc. ext2 is FAST ... tunable and non journaling meaning when it needs to fsck the chances of loosing something are higher AND it takes longer reiserfs is technically a great fs. Its designed bottom up a a journaling filesys and does it very quickly and is very good withg small files ext3 is a journaling fs by adding to ext2 ... bad news I don't think its as quick as resier BUT its able to fall back to ext2 if the journal is damaged. All of these filesystems have lots of tunable options. Don't forget jfs either ... but if you extreme tune say xfs for stability and small filees your probably better using a different fs to start with. An *ideal* system would have multple fs's on different partitions .. a big advantage over Win being you can have these whereever you want and they appear intergrated into the / media = xfs (remember you copy the mp3/mp4 once and read many time) /var and /etc are good for ext3 and or resier specifically tuned for small files. /bin (and /usr/share/bin ) etc etc are fine with mst defualt settings (except root usually doesn't need the default 5%) etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted November 4, 2005 Author Report Share Posted November 4, 2005 OK, cool that helps :P I might have to rebuild then, and choose reiserfs instead, so that I am safe with journaling and not having memory problems with xfs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted November 4, 2005 Report Share Posted November 4, 2005 Using Reiser 3.6 exclusively since ages here (excluding the systems where I have a small , circa 32MB separate /boot partition, which is formatted as ext2- since no journal is needed there!), and I couldn't be happier... I don't think I will ever return to ext3, but I might try Reiser4 when (and if) it gets OFFICIALLY supported by kernel.org. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted November 4, 2005 Author Report Share Posted November 4, 2005 OK, I'm going to persevere and if the errors and memory usage get too much I'll rebuild the system and choose reiserfs instead. It was typical during building it that I thought, should I, shouldn't I when choosing reiserfs or xfs. And I went with xfs. My laptop and another machine I built are all using reiserfs. So no idea why I chose xfs :P Shame there's no real way of converting, would save a rebuild, but then I can understand that the system would probably end up really screwed if you could convert them from one filesystem to another! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jboy Posted November 4, 2005 Report Share Posted November 4, 2005 (edited) Shame there's no real way of converting, would save a rebuild, but then I can understand that the system would probably end up really screwed if you could convert them from one filesystem to another! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Wouldn't this work? Not an in-place conversion to reiserfs but if this works it would avoid having to do a complete re-install. Do a backup on the partition in question Drop that partition Recreate it using reiserfs Restore your data from the backup Edit /etc/fstab accordingly Edit /etc/lilo.conf accordingly Run lilo to recreate bootloader Reboot Edited November 4, 2005 by jboy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted November 4, 2005 Author Report Share Posted November 4, 2005 That would be OK for the /home on the hdb partition. But my / partition would still be xfs too lol. OK, so based on that I have an idea. Can anyone confirm if this would be OK? I move all data from /dev/hdb (/home) to another machine on network. I create a partition of say 19GB reiserfs on hdb. I rsync /dev/hda (root) to /dev/hdb (root). Edit /etc/fstab to point to /dev/hdb. Do the same creating reiserfs on /dev/hda and rsync back. Edit fstab again. Create hdb with 160gb home reiserfs Copy data back. Sound feasible? :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted November 4, 2005 Report Share Posted November 4, 2005 Gowator summed it up quite well. I used ReiserFS a long time ago but since several years now, I use ext3. It is extra -secure anf the most stable filesystem imho. I can live with the little speed dropoff compared to ReiserFS or Reiser4. (After all, it is about stability and not speed that we chose Linux, right? ;)) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jboy Posted November 4, 2005 Report Share Posted November 4, 2005 That would be OK for the /home on the hdb partition. But my / partition would still be xfs too lol. OK, so based on that I have an idea. Can anyone confirm if this would be OK? I move all data from /dev/hdb (/home) to another machine on network. I create a partition of say 19GB reiserfs on hdb. I rsync /dev/hda (root) to /dev/hdb (root). Edit /etc/fstab to point to /dev/hdb. Do the same creating reiserfs on /dev/hda and rsync back. Edit fstab again. Create hdb with 160gb home reiserfs Copy data back. Sound feasible? :P <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It's unstated, but I would think this needs to be done either by booting from a LiveCD or a different Linux install on the machine in question. Also, might be better to do this in stages. Stage 1 (Convert /home): "move all data from /dev/hdb (/home) to another machine on network." Convert /dev/hdb (your /home) to reiserfs (drop, re-create) Move /home data back to /dev/hdb Edit fstab for new fs type Reboot Verify that it worked ok Phase 2 (convert root file system): Do the root file system conversion. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted November 4, 2005 Author Report Share Posted November 4, 2005 OK, shall give it a go. Worst case I have to rebuild anyway if it all goes wrong :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted November 5, 2005 Report Share Posted November 5, 2005 OK, shall give it a go. Worst case I have to rebuild anyway if it all goes wrong :P <{POST_SNAPBACK}> good point ... you can also ase partimage for the backup's ... works a treat and compresses the images too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted November 5, 2005 Author Report Share Posted November 5, 2005 Well, I was in two minds of doing the rsync, or to rebuild. What I did do, was rebuild :P I copied the files out of my home directory that I wanted to keep, and then reinstalled, and copied back afterwards. I had two reasons for doing this. One, was just in case I couldn't figure out how to get the rsync to work, and also, because I had some inherent problems anyway that a reinstall would probably solve. So, I'm now back up and running after a couple of hours. And all is well, no problems, and using reiserfs as the filesystem. All I've got to do now, is spend six hours downloading all the updates over a 128Kbps link :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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