[ale] Ext4 adoption anyone?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:04:39 -0500
Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net> wrote:

> These newer filesystems, including the ones used through FUSE - are
> any of them considered as reliable as ext3, jfs, xfs?

I'd imagine that would depend on who you ask.  I've had so-called
stable filesystems totally nuke my data, and filesystems in
development that never so much as sneezed for me.

I trust ext4 because of its common code with ext3.  And in fact, ext4
exposed ext3 to new eyes because there are neophytes out there, and
bugs were found in ext4 that were inherited from ext3 and then were
fixed in both.  I trust XFS less than I trust FAT32 because I have
never had a filesystem nuke my data as completely and efficiently as it
did back in 2.6.25 days.  I still see people reporting major bugs
(data loss ranging from small to extreme) in XFS to the kernel mailing
list, and I personally wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

Looking at my LKML folder today, I see 22 emails on problems with XFS,
compared to 6 for ext4.  Ted Tso jumped on that thread immediately (the
ext4 problem, which reported ENOSPC with ~500 MB left on the
filesystem); turns out the problem is that the user is unable to use
the very last 1% of their root filesystem, and it's being worked on
now.

I see nothing on JFS; that could mean that there is nobody using that
filesystem or that it is virtually bug-free.  Don't know which.  I also
see nothing for vfat, and 7 messages in 4 threads for btrfs, though
that is probably because only a few people are attempting to use btrfs
at this point.

As far as FUSE filesystems go, I haven't used many.  But I do know that
of the ones I have used (sshfs, WikipediaFS, NTFS-3G, and Captive NTFS)
I have never had any problems with the FUSE driver itself.  In the case
of sshfs, the only problem that I have ever had was with the remote
host dropping the connection after a timeout, which is easily fixed by
keeping the filesystem active or by just remounting the filesystem.  I
would like to play more with FUSE since the variety of file systems
available there is kind of impressive.  The idea of being able to mount
just about anything is kind of nice, and being in userspace, there may
be lossage, but there won't be kernel crashes, and that's a big plus.
That said, I haven't played enough with any single FUSE filesystem in
order to be able to make any substantial positive claims on it, but it
hasn't broke yet for me.

	--- Mike

-- 
My sigfile ran away and is on hiatus.
http://www.trausch.us/
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