Re: ext3 vs resiserfs vs xfs

[Andreas Dilger <adilger@turbolabs.com>]

On Nov 07, 2001  16:00 +0100, Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote:
> I just set up a RedHat 7.2 box with ext3, and after a few tests/chrashes,
> I see no difference at all. After a chrash, it really wants to run fsck
> anyway.

If you are getting a real* fsck for an "ext3" filesystem there are two
possibilities:

1) You actually have ext2, not ext3 - check /proc/mounts to be sure.
2) After 20 (by default) crashes, ext3 filesystems are fsck'd anyways.
   This is NOT because ext3 is bad/unreliable, but because hardware,
   RAM, kernels can be bad.  Use "tune2fs -c 50" to change this interval
   to every 50 mounts.  It is a bad idea to turn it off completely.

(*) Note that e2fsck WILL run on each boot, but will only recover the journal
    and clean up orphan inodes.  That will take < 2 seconds, and is not a sign
    that something is wrong with the filesystem.

> I've tried ReiserFS before, with no fsck after chrashes - is this
> because ReiserFS is better, or is it more like a hope-it's-ok-thinkig?

The latter - Hans and other reiserfs folks acknowledge that reiserfsck
is NOT safe enough to run on each boot, so they don't suggest running it
unless you have a problem.  e2fsck IS very good, so it can run on each
boot.  There are still lots of problems reported with reiserfs, and Hans
acknowledges that many of them are due to memory/hardware/kernel problems,
so it IS still a good idea to run fsck periodically at boot, but reiserfsck
cannot do that yet.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/