[ardour-users] Which filesystem to use?

[Jan Depner]

On Wed, 2005-10-26 at 22:24, Leandro Marco wrote:
> 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.
> 


    Reiser 3 on the 2.4 kernel is faster and more reliable than ext3
(see http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/Arcana.html).  It doesn't work
on the 2.6 kernel.  Reiser 4 is supposed to be fine on the 2.6 kernel
but I haven't tried it.  I use Reiser 3 on 2.4 (for now).


> 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.
> 

    Current PCs are reliable machines.  I've got about 15TB of storage
running on PogoLinux systems at work (2.6 kernel).  All except the root
drive are XFS.  We switched from ext3 to XFS and noticed a large
improvement in speed over ext3.  No reliability problems at all


-- 
Jan "Evil Twin" Depner
The Fuzzy Dice
http://www.thefuzzydice.com


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