On 22/08/09 19:47, KaiRo - Robert Kaiser wrote:
Vahis wrote:
I don't understand what I gain/miss with ext4/ext3.
I don't know all the details, but from all I read about kernel developmnet, ext4 is still rather experimental and not stable enough for solid enterprise production use. It's even worse with btrfs, which contains some reisrfs spirit and should be much better in terms of storage and even safety, but is also still under heavy development and not production-ready yet.
What do I miss if I stay ext3?
You at least gain a lot of stability the others can't yet provide.
Or should I go back to reiserfs? I never had an issue with it and the enterprice versions default to it.
Kernels starting from 2.6.28 or maybe somewhat earlier suffer from some hard to reproduce and never completely fixed race conditions in which fsync among others seems to play a role and which can result in completely locked ("dead", "uninterruptible sleep") processes accessing the file system. Also, extended attributes were never implemented really cleanly but are said to be somewhat hackish on reiserfs. It basically works, it's very good in terms of storage, but it's a second- or lesser-class citizen in current kernels and barely maintained.
Right now, I think the most reasonable choice is ext3, as it's very well-maintained, problems are resolved fast, and it's very stable. It's not the best choice in the long term, but both ext4 and btrfs, which will be interesting in the future (one as the continuation of the ext line, one as a significantly improved new approach), are not stable enough for general recommendation from all I hear. I know that multiple distributions are switching to ext4 as the default, but all I hear about it makes me skecpitcal as to that being a good choice.
Robert Kaiser
I use XFS mostly and ext3 in a couple of boxes. I have a 500G drive formatted with BTRFS that I use solely for backup, just in case, it's not my only backup. I hope to use it for some other stuff like building applications - I like testing new things. Linus is reported as using btrfs for his root partition - Greg KH, are you doing anything significant with btrfs?. In a rather lengthy article describing he design of btrfs, it's more like ZFS for Solaris, but with much more efficient and smarter. It's slated to replace ext4 a bit further down the road. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Licensed Private Pilot Emeritus IBM/Amdahl Mainframes and Sun/Fujitsu Servers Tech Support Specialist, Cricket Coach Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org