dragonfly pdf documentation

[Joerg Sonnenberger]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 11:57:21PM +1000, Steven Shaw wrote:
> Reiserfs and ext3 don't need fsck either though do they? Perhaps you
> were running early/unstable versions of either ext3 or reiserfs?

In theory yes. In practise ext3 can destroy directories under certain
circumstance, reiserfs its whole tree. It happened over the years
quite a few times to various people.

> Now I use reiserfs on Gentoo (comes recommended in Gentoo Handbook).

Gentoo is the "speed freak" distro, which explains the choice :)

> I've not had any problems. This is not very serious use - just my
> laptop but it gets daily use - don't have any problems kicking out the
> power cord though :).

It's not the normal case, this is about pathological cases, which
nevertheless must not happen.

> Can anyone provide more concrete evidence to feed the filesystem
> decision - particularly XFS v JFS v Reiserfs v Ext3 v BSD fs (? sorry
> I'm a *BSD newbie).

Ext2/3 has a similiar layout to UFS, the main difference is the way the
filesystem is accessed. By default, all BSDs have been using meta-data
sync mounts and Linux either journaled or async mounts. Async mounts
are inheriantly broken, because a system crash can destroy the whole
filesystem. Softdep is a compromise between async and sync, which tries
to keep the filesystem consistent without sacrifying too much speed.
XFS and JFS are completly different beasts, optimized for parallel
access and different "Enterprise" usage patterns.

Joerg