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the age old debate (ok maybe not age old): ext3 vs. ReiserFS vs. XFS

B

Barnaby W. Füi

Elite Member
i plan on doing a re-partition soon, and i figure while i'm at it, i might as well go for a better FS. i'm using ext3 right now. i hear lots of good things about ReiserFS, especially that it's faster. I've also heard that it can be unreliable. XFS seems to be pretty safe (SGI uses it right?), but not many people seem to use it.

i'll take reliability over speed anyday, but i just wanna get some opinions from you guys' perspective, and any experiences you've had.

thanks 🙂
 
Well, since we use RedHat Linux here on our servers, I only load new servers with Ext3 filesystems. That way RedHat won't whine when I call if I need tech support.
 
XFS is rock solid. It's decently fast, but my box always booted right up when my power would go out (which was frequently due to wiring issues). As a satisfied user for several months, I'll suggest it to anyone for anything.

Beforehand I used ext3, which also gave me no problems. As far as Reiser goes, I've heard of some horror stories, but just as many good stories. YMMV. Good luck.
 
To me it would be between Ext3 and XFS.

If XFS was more widely supported in the Linux world, I'd take that over Ext3 in a heartbeat, but for now, Ext3 is a solid choice since it's easy to upgrade from Ext2->Ext3, it's supported in all the recent 2.4.x kernels, and it's simply an evolution of Ext2, which means less chance of nasty bugs and such.
 
yeah sunner i definitely agree that ext3 is convenient because almost everything supports ext2....hm, ext3 has been workin good, i might just keep it

thinking about XFS though...
 
XFS rocks, plain and simple.

reiserfs seems to be an ever changing entity, reiser4 is going to be a complete rewrite from what I hear. And the userspace tools (fsck, mkfs, resize, etc) aren't nearly as 'professional' as the XFS ones.
 
I wouldn't discount JFS, it was killer in AIX... been ported to linux... I haven't used it yet in linux but plan to very soon. Anyone used it yet?
 
Isn't the problem w/ XFS that you have to manually patch the kernel source, and it's not as easy as that sounds?
 
Patching the kernel is easy, but the fact that you have to suggests that it's support in the community could be better.

I dont like messing with external patches and such when it's about a production server.
 
Sunner,

Patching in general is not hard. But each distro is essentially a "kernel fork". My understanding is that kernel patches apply correctly to the vanilla source, but often won't work for vendor forks.

And your analysis is right; the fact that you have to apply a kernel patch indicates SGI's XFS is on the outside looking in (at least for now).
 
I wouldn't discount JFS, it was killer in AIX... been ported to linux... I haven't used it yet in linux but plan to very soon. Anyone used it yet?

The JFS IBM ported is the OS/2 version not the AIX version, I believe the idea is to make this JFS (JFS2 in AIX I believe) replace the original eventually, but all the features aren't complete yet.

Isn't the problem w/ XFS that you have to manually patch the kernel source, and it's not as easy as that sounds?

SGI has a CVS server where you can check out a fully patched kernel tree alrealdy. And they make patched RH install disks so you can install directly onto XFS from the start.

And your analysis is right; the fact that you have to apply a kernel patch indicates SGI's XFS is on the outside looking in (at least for now).

They have to be, XFS supports a lot of things Linux doesn't have generic implementations for yet, like ACLs, DMAPI and EAs.

And they're using the same XFS tree on IRIX so they have compatibility a high priority.
 
I know that you asked about reliability. But I would like to know how speed fitts into this. Which FS is the fastest?
 


<< I know that you asked about reliability. But I would like to know how speed fitts into this. Which FS is the fastest? >>



From what I've heard/seen Reiser and XFS are noticeable faster than ext3.

My current setup is that I have / as an ext2 partition (very easy to convert from the default install) and /home as a ReiserFS partition (because I could umount and then mkreiserfs this one with the system booted). One thing to take note of though: I can't remember which one, but the XFS patch directly interferes with one of the increased secuirity patches (might be the one from the NSA; I can't remember for sure). Since this does sound like a "work" machine you're talking about that patch might be more valuable to you than XFS. My advice would be to keep ext3 for now. It's stable, fast enough, and won't cause much problems for you.
 
Not to mention since ext3 is default in Red Hat, it's quickly becoming the de facto standard.

ReiserFS has been shipping with SuSE for a very long time so it's considered stable enough (although some users disagree), but SuSE doesn't have the distribution channel to single-handedly make ReiserFS a standard.

As for XFS and JFS, they will be sit on the fringe as long as they aren't merged into the canonical stable kernel tree. I believe JFS has been merged into the devel branch.
 
well i finally repartitioned, and i just stuck with ext3. the only issue people seem to (sometimes) have with it is speed, and i can deal with that.
 
I use ext3 for my boot partition, and XFS for my main setup. XFS just rocks. I am just a "normal" user and it seems fast. However, that may be because I use Gentoo Linux
 
Wartman, just so you know, you made that a HTTPS link, and the site it points to looks a bit... odd.

I especially like their homemade SSL cert 🙂
 
I've got one of those ReiserFS horror stories for you!
Back when I built my athlon box about a year ago, I put Mandrake 8.* (don't remember the minor) on it and used ReiserFS for everything. I had essentially no stability. It just wouldn't stay up! I have an Iwill KK266 MB, which had problems early on, but bios updates didn't help.
From looking at LKML, I suspected ReiserFS as others, particularly with Via boards seemed to have trouble with it. The Mandrake help list was pretty snotty and just chalked it up to "bad hardware", and claimed that ReiserFS was "rock-solid".
Funny, but when I reinstalled with ext2, the machine was rock-solid. I tried all sorts of ugly stuff, and it was fine. Shortly after that a bunch of big bug-fixes for ReiserFS came out (the tail stuff). So much for Mandrake's "rock-solid".

Well, maybe not a horror story, but it wasn't fun.

In watching LKML I also became less then impressed with Hans Reiser, the creator of ReiserFS. He's very reluctanct to acknowledge potential problems with his baby, and would prefer to argue to death over it then look for the problem or try others patches. My opinion of course.

edit: In all that ReiserFS bashing I forgot to give you my preference!
I've been using ext3 on 2 machines for several months now. No problems at all despite a few hard-shutdowns (power related). I haven't tried XFS or JFS.
 
I went from ext2 to ext3 on our mail server and the difference is amazing. What used to take 15-20 seconds is not instantaneous. Partially due to 7200rpm up to 10,000rpm but I'm sure ext3 helped a bit too.
 
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