[ardour-users] Which filesystem to use?

[Leandro Marco]

Hi. Once I saw a lecture of Ted Tso (the creator od ext2/ext3) and he
said that reiser has an disadvantage in real time aplications because
it periodically has to balance the B tree of the file system. When
this occurs, we have a kernel lock (so we loose real time
performance). So I guess ext3 is the best option. But, I guess that
all your partitions must be ext3, because other processes running will
write in the reiser partition leading to kernel locks.

About XFS, in the same lecture, he said that is a great filesystem,
but for reliable machines (SGI clusters, for example). It uses logical
journaling that just changes the 1 bit afected in the journal when
there is a crash, instead of replay a bigger piece of the journal. It
is great for performance but if you have a reliable machine. In
ordinary PCs what occurs when there is a lack of power, is that the
memory starts to send things that makes no sense and as the HD take
more time to be switched off, when you restart the filesystem, it will
replay just 1 bit of the journal that it thinks is the only one
affected, but there may be more and then you have a corrupted
filesystem in this case.

Sorry about the English errors. :-)

P.S.: I use reiserfs. Does anyone uses JFS?
On 10/26/05, James Rich <james at chowhouse.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Oct 2005, Paul Winkler wrote:
>
> >> As for the filesystem, I run ReiserFs and XFS.
> >> ReiserFs claims to be the fastest. It is a young
> >> filesystem also  I believe.
> >
> > Reiserfs was actually the first journalling filesystem
> > available for linux.  Reiserfs 3 is rock-solid.
> > You're probably thinking of reiser 4 which is not as
> > widely deployed yet, and has a web page chock-full of provocative
> > and mystifying ideas ;-)
>
> While reiserfs was the first journaling fs to be actually included in the
> standard kernel, it wasn't really the first journaling fs available.  IIRC
> xfs was available first, but it was not included in the standard kernel
> for some time.
>
> Various benchmarks have shown that reiserfs is very fast when you have
> many small files.  But on large files xfs has consistently held the top
> spot in performance.  Usually, files sizes for pro audio work are large.
>
> I've been using xfs for several years and continue to be amazed at both
> the speed and reliability.  The *most* important thing a filesystem must
> have is reliability.  Speed is a very nice bonus which xfs has on large
> filesystems.
>
> James Rich
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