Hello out there... I hope this question won't raise a fs-jihad ;-). And I hope this mail isn't too long, but I'm trying to be as specific as possible.
On installing Mandrake 8.1 the Installer offers various options for the partition's fs. I'm again in the business of setting up a usual PC as a dual-boot machine with NT 4 and Man 8.1. And now I wonder which FS to choose for my particular layout... ext2, ext3, ReiserFS or XFS,... NT is for work and m8.1 is for experimenting, learning and exposing some of our "you can't be wrong with windoze"-guys to "unknown" alternatives. The hardware is quite simple: P-III, DVD-Drive, HP CD-burner, Creative soundblaster and 3Com-LAN-NIC. I already browsed through the mandrake user and reference manuals, the SUSE sysad-manual, the LSAG (LDP), googled in some linux newsgroups and o'reilly's "running linux, 2nd ed". But none of them came up with some sort of recommendation or rule of thumb for this case. Just a short statement in LSAG: "There is usually little point in using many different filesystems. Currently, ext2 is the most popular one, and it is probably the wisest choice. (...) This needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis." Looks a little bit outdated... The purpose of the m8.1 will primarily be: Gaining experience. It will serve as a workstation and server. "Areas" to be included: Apache, samba, NFS, mysql, postgresql, networking tools, developing and the usual KDE, internet & office stuff (no fancy multi-media stuff, mp3 or the like). And later maybe oracle 9i personal edition... Hence I designed the following layout for my m8.1 part of the disk: /boot 50 MB /swap 800 MB (approx. 3 * RAM size) / 250 MB /var 650 MB /usr 9800 MB /home 7000 MB On the IBM-DeveloperWorks-Site (in general a very nice source for tutorials on lx, java, xml,...) I found a series of articles by Daniel Robbins dealing with the new array of filesystems for the 2.4 kernel. According to the IBM author those FS's show the different advantages and diadvantages: ReiserFS + better in handling small files (< 4 k) - eventually performance loss with reading large mail directories - poor sparse file performance - NFs compatibility not so good ext3 + easys transition from ext2 + backward compatible to ext2 + supposed to be very reliable - slightly "slower" than XFS/reiserFS XFS + speedy on large files + efficient disk accesses - slower deletes Robbins' recommendation: "Those who were looking for raw performance generally leaned towards ReiserFS, while those more interested in meticulous data integrity features preferred ext3. However, with the release of XFS for Linux, things have suddenly become much more confusing." I'm still not sure which fs design to choose. Should all partitions have the same fs including /boot and / ? Which one ? Do you, out there, have any hands-on recommendations for this purpose ? Experience with the reliability, recoverability and compatibility of the various fs' ? Any known problem areas for the three fs ? Thanx in advance from Berlin Oliver BTW - this is a very nice mailing list. Not too much traffic. Hence you still can follow all threads and learn a lot :-).
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