Re: Filesystem recommendations

On Saturday 24 April 2010 12:53:25 B. Alexander wrote:
I have a question on filesystems. Back in the day, I started using reiser3.
It was faster than ext3, and it could be extended without umounting the
filesystem (which has since been fixed in ext3), plus, unlike any
filesystem I have encountered, it could be reduced in size.

I'm also a current reiser3 user. I find the ability to shrink the filesystem
to be something I am not willing to do without.

I have not read the rest of the thread, but my off-the-cuff recommendation
would be to start migration to btrfs. Now that the on-disk format has
stabilized, I am going to start testing it for filesystems other than
/usr/local, /var, and /home. Assuming I can keep those running well for 6-12
months, I will migrate /usr/local, /var, and then /home, in that order, with a
1-3 month gap in between migrations.

It's an aggressive migration plan, but reiser3 is just barely maintained in
the kernel, and btrfs is the only filesystem I have heard of that even
advertises all the features I need.

I've already encountered an issue related to btrfs in my very isolated
deployments. The initramfs created by update-initramfs does not appear to
mount it properly. Instead I am given an '(initramfs)' prompt and I have to
mount the filesystem manually (a simple two-argument mount command suffices)
and continue the boot process. This is fine for my laptop, but servers (and
even my desktop) need to be able to boot unattended; I am still investigating
the issue, which may just be due to my configuration.
--
Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =.
bss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ((_/)o o(\_))
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