Hmm, I'm not sure what the context is here?

 Features / fs    | xfs | ext3 | jfs | reiserfs |
-------------------------------------------------
removable fs      |  ?  |  ?   |  N  |    ?     |
-------------------------------------------------

I have removed / replaced both jfs and ext2 filesystems
housed on hotswap scsi with no visible issues/problems

As long as the drive has been cleanly unmounted (and
the interface is a hot-swap type) I think all of these 
should be safe, but perhaps I'm misreading the context.




Additional considerations, applications which are likely to care 
about fs implementation details are listed below.

I regret I don't have as many answers to add as I would like
(and should be able) to provide, however I presently only have
bsd and linux w/ jfs running so I can't make additions.

-- forrest


1. AFS

AFS - Andrew file system ACL-based access control with kerberos(IV)
authentication. - On the server afs volumes modify inode structure 
of the host FS, This is not fsck-safe! I don't know if it would
be safe for journal operations, but it's safe to say that it's 
only likely  to work on ext3.

xfs has been reported as both working and not on the server side.
ext3 is reported as working 'in theory' as a place for the cache.
Some versions of reiser are said to have worked.

AFS runs on nearly every unix implementation (and therefor in
some supported native FS on all of these unices). While the 
Transarc-supported versions may provide fsck-saftey through
system patches, in all OpenAFS cases I know of, the code is 
making raw changes to the disk metadata which *require* that
the server-volume disks never be fsck-ed. 

Arla is the kth implementation of AFS I expect it's internals are 
similar to transarc / openafs but do not know this with any
certainty. I run arla as a client on openbsd and it does not 
seem to play the games with the ffs that are done by afs on 
it's host filesystems.



2. SE-Linux, NSA's security design runnning on Linux through LSM.

SE-Linux expects to track security ID and security context of both 
processes and persistent (disk) data. It assumes that there is a
file:inode mapping which cannot be changed except by the known system 
call interface (which is hooked by LSM). A fs which does not adhere 
to this assumption can be expected to break SELinux.

I beleive at this time ext3 and reiserfs are tested *by the developers*
to work on SE-Linux. I have personally found that jfs works and xfs 
used to be noted in the se-linux notes as working, and I beleive that
it still does.

The one potential issue I found was that in checking against the Inode
consistency requirement, Reiser indicated that a future release of 
reiserfs may change that assumption. I suggested to Hans that at least
having the option of preserving backward compatibility would be a
good idea(tm) and he agreed and said they would plan on that.

3. VmWare

VMware inc promises that virtual machines can run off of virtual disks
based on ext2-3 and specifically state that there are technical limitations
on some journaling fs's (I forget which, either xfs or reiserfs) - they
work but with some limitations. I found that jfs worked well as a host for 
vmware guest os's but did encounter the limitation mentioned by vmware inc.)

Naturally, all of these journaled fs's work in guest OS's

4. UML user mode linux

Because UML, unlike vmware is provided as a 'translation' layer I assume
it's going to have different semantics in how it talks to the disks, and
that some low-level calls may not be available, however I have no experience
to say what will work or not.





 Features \ fs    | xfs | ext3 | jfs | reiserfs |
-------------------------------------------------
chattr            |  ?  |  Y   |  ?  |    ?     |
-------------------------------------------------
quotas            |  Y  |  ?   |  Y  |    ?     |
-------------------------------------------------
removable fs      |  ?  |  ?   |  N  |    ?     |
-------------------------------------------------
NFS               |  Y  |  Y   |  Y  |    Y     |
-------------------------------------------------
samba             |  Y  |  Y   |  Y  |    Y     |
-------------------------------------------------
coda              |  ?  |  ?   |  ?  |    ?     |
-------------------------------------------------
O_DIRECT          |  Y  |  N   |  ?  |    Y     |
-------------------------------------------------
SE_Linux          |  Y  |  Y   |  Y* |  maybe   |
-------------------------------------------------
afs (server|cache)|  N  | poss?|  N  |    N     | -- must not fsck server afs volumes
------------------------------------------------- -- ext3 journal replay safe??
arla       "      |  ?  |  ?   |  ?  |    ?     |
-------------------------------------------------
Vmware (host)     |  ?  |  Y   | part|   part   |
-------------------------------------------------



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