From: jon@robots.ox.ac.uk (Jon Tombs) Subject: Re: [C] Best Filesystem? Date: Fri, 9 Jul 1993 12:15:40 GMT
In article <MUTS.93Jul8225340@muts.hacktic.nl> muts@muts.hacktic.nl (Peter Mutsaers) writes:
>On Thu, 8 Jul 1993 00:07:21 GMT, smithc@lars.acc.stolaf.edu (Christopher A. Smith) said:
>
> CAS> Which of the available filesystems -- ext, ext2, minix, xiafs
> CAS> -- is the best choice for use with a linux system? A co-worker
> CAS> is installing linux soon and was wondering about that. 'Twas a
> CAS> good question in my opinion so I'm putting it forth to
> CAS> y'all...
>
>If it comes to features and future developments: ext2. If it comes to
>speed: xiafs. (I did extensive tests on large filesystems)
>I think both are very reliable. ext and minix are either very slow or
>very limited.
Actually when I did some tests I found the order of speed (for fresh
filesystems) was:
DOS > minix > xiafs > ext2 >> ext.
we can forgert DOS I assume :-)
I think ext only still in the kernel for backward compatibility, compiling
the Xserver would sometimes take 20 seconds to sync when I tried building on
an ext filesystem.
Minix is pretty stable and with 30 character names is usable if you don't
need separate utime/atime/ctime. It gets slower as the filesystem gets more
fragmented. It only uses 64b per inode I think.
xiafs wastes less diskspace than ext2 (128b Vs 256b per inode), but I after
having to reset the machine from an X crash. I lost my entire filesystem.
the xiafs fsck is farily primative and can't always repair.
ext2 has a broken mkfs, but a very good (in my experience) fsck. It supports
a clean bit so you don't need to fsck every boot if it was shut down first.
It also has (unimplemented) support for fragments and undelete, which might
be very useful. It will probably be the first filesystem to support >1024b
blocks. ext2 seems pretty good at keeping the filesystem unfragmented, for
large files atleast I'd say better than xiafs although I've heard others
say different for small files.
As the speed difference for my setup was negligable and a reliable fsck
is important I've changed over to all ext2 filesystems now.
Lets not start a filesystem flame war now, these are personal expriences.
Disk and motherboard designs might change things slightly on other setups,
my main concern is compiling X which requires a minimum of 30MB and the
binary -g is > 6MB.
Jon.