"One major feature present in Fedora 9 will be the ext4 implementation. The new filesystem will not be the default for the distribution, but will be available for users and systems administrators to enable. New functionality includes larger capacities and online defragmentation, for better performance and more reliability. To find out more, we talked with Eric Sandeen, Fedora project member and filesystem developer at Red Hat."
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Member since:2005-07-08
Many people disagree and seem to have had problems with XFS according to comments online. (I can't find and remember the exact web links just now but a search for "problems with XFS" brings lots of results in Google. Of course, the same probably with other file systems too, however...:P)
New journaling versions of the ext file systems (3 & 4) are meant to be reliable. And rock solid reliability is by far the most important feature a file system can have IMHO.
I don't know what exactly would be the major benefits of xfs over ext3 or ext4? As far as I can remember to have read XFS failure handling could be improved, the file system cannot be shrunk, some operations can be slow etc.
I've seen many people hype the supposedly much better performance of XFS (or ReiserFS, Reiser4 and other file systems) compared to old ext-based file systems. But according to real tests there seems not to be huge performance differences between the journaling file systems in Linux (ext, reiserfs, xfs jfs). In some tests some file system may be slightly faster and in other tests the others may have a small benefit.
Personally I would trade a debatable tiny amount of extra file system speed for greater reliability anytime. Anyway, a lot of the talk concerning file systems seems to be based on subjective feelings mostly.
Member since:2005-07-24
When push comes to shove, XFS is just not that great. It's an early 90's filesystem that carries a seemingly unshakable mystique because Silicon Graphics originally created it. But it's old, not a good fit for Linux, and of the Linux filesystems is the most likely to trash your data after any sort of unexpected shutdown. It's pretty fast if you are streaming large data files to or from a very fast raid array. That's about it. Otherwise, you might as well use a more reliable filesystem.
JFS is pretty good, but has been completely abandoned. My understanding is that it has no maintainer at all these days.
Ext4 is a necessary successor to ext3. And I'm hoping that btrfs will be the next logical step. Let's try to move forward through the 21st century and not backwards into the 20th.
Member since:2006-02-05
Member since:2005-11-14
XFS deletes large files faster than the other filesystems. For desktop use, this is trivial; for a dedicated server like MythTV where the average file is 1.8Gb or larger and files are being deleted constantly while other disk-intensive activities are going on, it is not trivial.
It's irritating that the alternate install versions of Ubuntu can correctly create/format an XFS partition but the regular liveCDs have not been able to for at least three major versions.
Member since:
2006-03-13
Given that Linux has high-end production-quality filesystems like XFS (my personal favorite) and JFS available, why are we still mucking about with trying to bringing ext up to date. Yes, ext4 is a bigger change than ext3 was, but still... We have better filesystems already.