XFS/EXT3/Reiser?

[orasis]

Which one do you suggest for Desktop oriented use? - I have tried EXT3.. I was not too thrilled by it's performance under any Linux OS to tell you the truth... so the choices are between Reiser and XFS? - For a general desktop system.. videos .. games office and the like?

[The Headacher]

I'm not sure how well xfs works, last time I tried it I wasn't all that thrilled about it. I'm now using Reiserfs, it's stable and fast enough for desktop use here. I'm a lot happier with it than I was with ext3.

[MikeCindi]

I also use reiserFS mostly but am currently using XFS for my /home partition and reiserFS for /. (I have "gotten away with" using XFS on / and booting from the superblock but all the documentation screams not to to that so I don't anymore. Perhaps that's a sign of VL's robustness vs. my ignorance.) I would agree that the overhead of ext3 is not something that I want to live with even though most "modern" computers (fast processor, large HD, a lot of RAM) keeps the user from noticing. Using a journaled FS is a no-brainer and there seem to be advantages for each that VL offers. I have included this link in other threads with similar topics as I found it very informative: http://linuxgazette.net/122/piszcz.html.
HTH,
Mike

[Xeon]

It's a damn shame linux systems still use reiserFS. I've got several very negative critics about me using reiserFS on my machines. Thats why I asked for XFS support in the first place.

EXT3 will never really thrill you with performances, mainly because it's a file system designed to handle large data blocks. On a desktop, you work with smaller files and ext3 won't really deal that in a fast way.

XFS however has thrilled me in all dimensions. It's stability, speed, and usability for both big and small files make it a perfect mix. (Ok, if you move 200gb data at once ext3 will be faster.)
I got XFS On my pentium 2 box as well now, and I noticed a speed boost of about 15 seconds between XFS and reiserFS (in the favor of XFS). The total boot now takes 47 seconds.

edit: mikecindi, didn't know about the doc screamings. ow well. I haven't got any problems with XFS on / yet.

[MikeCindi]

Yeah they scream...had a few here do the same (in a nice way - http://www.vectorlinux.com/forum2/index.php?topic=2937.0). There is the probability of corrupting the partition because XFS uses a partition's superblock. If you boot from the MBR there is no problem with / being XFS.
In the link from my first post, which is actually a revision of the author's initial benchmarks (he used a 2.4.x kernel the first time and a 2.6.x this time), he comments that reiserFS is very slow to mount.

ReiserFS takes a VERY long time to mount the filesystem. I included this test because I found it actually takes minutes to hours mounting a ReiserFS filesystem on a large RAID volume.

[easuter]

I also use reiserFS mostly but am currently using XFS for my /home partition and reiserFS for /. (I have "gotten away with" using XFS on / and booting from the superblock but all the documentation screams not to to that so I don't anymore. Perhaps that's a sign of VL's robustness vs. my ignorance.) I would agree that the overhead of ext3 is not something that I want to live with even though most "modern" computers (fast processor, large HD, a lot of RAM) keeps the user from noticing. Using a journaled FS is a no-brainer and there seem to be advantages for each that VL offers. I have included this link in other threads with similar topics as I found it very informative: http://linuxgazette.net/122/piszcz.html.
HTH,
Mike

JFS also seems to be a good choice for laptops as the CPU usage for practically all the operations was lower that other filesystems.

[MikeCindi]

I agree...it seems to be an appealing option in many ways. I had commented with you (http://www.vectorlinux.com/forum2/index.php?topic=4225.0) about that in hopes that perhaps JFS would become an option during VL installation. The decreased CPU load would seem to be ideal for VL's philosophy.

[orasis]

With all of this back and forth I think I am going to go with the ReiserFS.. although I have heard some stories of data corruption and it being prone to failure - it feels as if it has performed quicker than XFS - on MY pc anyways - I am sure some of you have had better luck with it....

So so far for me.. it's...

1. RFS
2. XFS
3. EXT3

It still surprises me that EXT3 is still the default for most Linux'es... I guess it's due to the fact that it had the most recovery tools for it.

[MikeCindi]

A lot of use of ext3 is probably due to its being around longer than others (advanced from ext2) so people know it better. Although I've not researched it I'm sure that there are episodes of data corruption with all the file systems that are just as significant as what has been reported for reiserFS. Thus I doubt that you will go wrong with any. As for me I rank them as you have (reiserFS, XFS, ext3) and would like to see a few more available for VL.

[lagagnon]

 I have installed VL5.1-VL5.8 Standard on probably over 200 refurbished Pentium II-III machines now and have always used ReiserFS. As far as I know none of our clients have ever had filesystem errors or corruptions. Most of our problems have been hardware based (failing older hard drives mostly) and user-based (if you know what I mean  ).

[DrGrov]

I've been with ext3 now for about two and a half year without any sort of issues. So I think I will continue using ext3 even further.
This on a old P2 Celeron 466Mhz 192MB of RAM. Running KDE well but now using Fluxbox.
I reckon the ck2 kernel from the repos helps as well since the workload isn't that big with the custom Con Kolivas kernel patchset than it was for me with the default 5.8 Standard kernel. Opinions are of course many, I reckon all are good in their own ways.

[exeterdad]

I'm a believer in the recovery tools for ReiserFS.  I had a drive that must of been getting worn out as I ended up with a bad sector on a very important partition.  I couldn't mount or repair it whatsoever. I forget what tool is was, but I was able to copy all uncorrupted data over to a different disk, then it went back to the corrupted data and salvaged savable data from both sides of the bad sector.  It did such a great job that I have no idea what I ended up losing.

[sledgehammer]

According to Wired (July, 2007, p 111), Hans Reiser was arraigned for murder in October, 2006 and is being held in Santa Rita Jail near San Francisco.   He is prisoner BFP563. He was preparing Reiser4, his next-generation code, for inclusion in the Linux kernel when arrested, but is understandably having trouble finishing it. Wikipedia says his trial begins October 29.  Don't know if his wife is dead and if so whether he killed her. 

I know that I do use his file system. I use Htop to kill the offending program and have had no problems since learning to use Htop rather than cntrl-alt-backspace.

John

[blurymind]

its said that reiser4 is the fastest file system,but somewhat not fully tested and stable.

I use reiserfs and im happy with it.

i read a thrilling article about ext4,which btw is already an option in some distros (i think suse supports it by default already)...but never actually tested it.

people had problems  (data loss) with xfs (or so i read in an article quite a while ago) ,thats why its not so used.

i'd suggest reirfs.

as i look back at fat32 and ntfs, i start to wonder,how primitive these filesystems are and how m$ keeps on using them for windoze.
Fat32 gets easily corrupted,both get heavily fragmented for no time, they have no user perissions support  and are way slower (not to mention old)

[blackbelt_jones]

I've heard some bad things about Reiser, so I've generally used ext3.  Lately though, I've been splitting up my system between a / (root) partition and a /home partition, so with all my data on a seperate partition, I've been trying reiser for /.

Hell, I can't tell any difference.

I've noticed  that ext3 seems to be making a comeback as default filesystem for some popular distros.  Opensuse switched from reiser to ext3 with 10.2.  Slackware switched to ext3 with 12.0.  Of course, both of these distros still give you a choice.