Filesystem wars! (was Re: woody CDs :()

[Blake Barnett]

On Wed, 2002-03-27 at 11:58, Kevin Buettner wrote: 
> I have one ReiserFS partition, but I don't use it much.  The thing
> that scares me about ReiserFS is that I've heard there are (were?) NFS
> compatibility problems.  Also, I've heard tales of filesystem corruption
> with ReiserFS.  Perhaps these problems are fixed now; I haven't checked
> recently.
> 
I've seen reports even recently of some pretty harsh corruption with
Reiser, I've also seen reports of systems running without problems for
long periods of time with HUGE amounts of data... as always YMMV. 

> I'm still using ext2 and ext3 for most of my filesystems.

Stick with them, if they do everything you need, why change? 

> 
> > What advantages does XFS have?  Maybe more tried-and-true due to age?
> > Do you suppose its acquired stability has completely survived the porting
> > to Linux?
> 
> There's also JFS from IBM.

JFS has not survived the porting process nearly as well as XFS.  Both
have some issues.  XFS will be very solid in 2.6 (2.5 currently...) 
> 
> > BTW if anybody is using Coda successfully I could use help with that too.
> 
> I played around with Coda recently, but there was a pretty severe bug
> that prevented me from going very far with it.  It looks to me like
> this is a dead end project; I think the Coda developers have switched
> to Intermezzo.

Yes, coda is almost purely a research project, not really worth trying
to use for anything near production. 
> 
> > Meanwhile Intermezzo seems too immature and only works on top of an ext3
> > filesystem.
> 
> I concur.

Intermezzo is the result of the research on Coda... Give it a little
more time and it'll be pretty usable.  But as always, you have to ask
yourself if you really need disconnected operation.  The benefits may
not be as great as you think...  Mr. Braam (the primary author) said
these very words to me.   NFSv4 may be a more viable solution for most
problems. 

-- 
Blake Barnett (bdb)  <blake.barnett@developonline.com>
Sr. Unix Administrator
DevelopOnline.com                 office: 480-377-6816

Learning is a skill, you get better at it with practice.