As Linux made its way further into the enterprise, a key feature that it was lacking at one point in time was a journaling file system. This was true in 1999, but today there are four journaling file systems that can solve enterprise server requirements. This article focuses on one of them: JFS.
An Advanced File System for Linux
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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JFS was very buggy the last time i tried it. It would corrupt itself after untarring the gentoo stage1. I really wanted it to work because some websites showed its performance to be better than all other filesystems in most cases. Perhaps i’ll try it again. OSNews looks AWESOME in elinks…. this is bad ass.
>OSNews looks AWESOME in elinks
Thanks, we have some pretty good support for all text mode & mobile browsers.
Anyone know when ReiserFS-4 will ship? It’s supposed to be the fastest of them all. Namesys’s front page says that it is in final testing but it has said that for quite a while now.
> Anyone know when ReiserFS-4 will ship? It’s supposed to be the fastest of them all. Namesys’s front page says that it is in final testing but it has said that for quite a while now.
Is ReiserFS-4 ATOMIC yet? I know many people who ended up having data corruption with previous version of Reiser…
> Is ReiserFS-4 ATOMIC yet? I know many people who ended up
> having data corruption with previous version of Reiser…
>
Yes. It is atomic with respect to single files. In the future it will also be possible to do transactions involving multiple files atomically.
This is really the coolest feature of Reiser4. Performance is just an added bonus.
I don’t know when ReiserFS-4 will be officially in the kernel. But as expected many Gentoo folks have it running. If you are interested check the link below. There’s more info there. You would have to improvise a little, the thread is gentoo specific..
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=116785&highlight=resier4
Quote from article:
JFS for Linux is a file system based on IBM’s JFS file system for OS/2 Warp Server for e-business.
It’s come straight from AIX (IBM’s UNIX flavour OS.) The JFS found on OS/2 workstations and servers isn’t up to date. You can’t even boot from it.
I use JFS on AIX because i have to, BUT for Linux we have XFS made by SGI, afterall XFS is most scalable, fast B-trees and reliable.. JFS is not a good performer and that is the fact!
Reiser is NOT tested yet enough, so i don’t recomend it for production use.
JFS is not a good performer and that is the fact
There is no such fact. Depending on which benchmark you read either JFS or XFS can be faster. It seems to depend on how the filesystems are used.
I agree about reiser though. I know many people really like it, but after it hosed one of my friends systems and even the reiser fsck core dumped, I just don’t trust it. Red Hat also refused to use rieser for reliablitly reasons, but apparently many of the actual Red Hat engineers think reiser is great.
I also thought my two netgear routers were good, but they both suddenly up and died within a week of each other! So who knows, maybe reiser is indeed fine and I just had a rare or early buggy version.
I really can’t see an advantage of those new FS’s in a *desktop machine* over ext2. Ext2 is tried and tested, robust, and fast the sufficient for an common user box (generaly, the fastest!). Of course, XFS, JFS, ReiserFS are the killers for large installations.
Ext2 is not journaled. On a power failure, a reboot and fsck could take upwards near 30 minutes depending on Filesystem sizes.
Ext3 is journaled though.
Aren’t those both aimed and designed to scale well over networks? Doesn’t that mean that they probably made some design choices that are less than optimal for regular desktops? I remember reading that XFS was designed to “agressive” cache reads and writes, I’m not sure that is necessary helpful on average memory machines…
I’m glad that ReiserFS is receiving the attention, and testing, needed to make it the true future of file systems. And be production ready in time to show what a nasty kludge WinFS will turn out to be.
Is Reiser4 Open Source? I would like to write a Reiser IFS driverv for Windows NT (4,5,5.1) / ReactOS. Thanks
-VoidLogic
“JFS is not a good performer and that is the fact!”
Are you speaking from experience? I didn’t think that that was the problem but rather stability. And that it is XFS that doesn’t perform as well but is stable.
“I’m glad that ReiserFS… and testing…”
It seems that there is not enough of that for v4. It’s another chicken and egg problem. I just checked – v4 is at 0.5 – so it might be a while. The developers tried to get it included in Fedora but Fedora said more real world testing first. Understandable. Image the headlines – “Linux is unreliable”. reiserFS-3 on the other hand is stable and default on SuSE.
Yes it is, though you can buy a closed source license for it.
can be caused by “disconnected” inodes. This seems to be a problems with files > 2G ( it also happened to me on a ext2 filesystem patched for large file support).
A reboot WON’T fix this, you have to run xfs_repair to solve the problem. Of course, if the inodes are part of the root filesystem, you’ll have to boot from a rescue/install CD or floppy to do this.
Same if you only created a single filesystem for your linux install.
im a big fan of xfs and reiser, however i tend to use reiser because more distros i uses support it right out of the box (including redhat9, as long as you partition in something else).
i havent had any problems with ext3, reiserfs, nor xfs, but then again my experience in actually running reiser and xfs is limited to around a dozen machines or so. ive always defaulted to running ext3 on anything i considered mission critical (luckily fs performance wasnt an issue, reliability was)
ive often thought about setting up a machine with ntfs partitions for use as /usr and /home mounted with captive. just curious what would happen and how stable it would be. a glutton for punishment perhaps? ;}
i tend to use reiser because more distros i uses support it right out of the box
thats because only recently was it accepted into the 2.4 kernel… and even then with much bru-ha-ha.
It all depends what you’re after and what you’re doing with the computer. Performance, compatibility. After i read several performance reports, i found out Ext3FS doesn’t deliver a good performance versus other journaling filesystems.
Ext2FS and Ext3FS are compatible. Read support for Ext2FS or Ext3FS is in every recent Linux kernel, and supported by the BSD’s, and supported by 3rd party Windows programs. Write supports differs though.
Compare that with XFS, which only patched or very recent Linux kernels support (stable: 2.6.0+ and 2.4.25+) or SGI’s IRIX you’re not very compatible. Is that a problem? Depends on the situation. Same can be said about JFS, ReiserFS3, ReiserFS4, and many others.
Each of these journaling filesystems do deliver a better performance than the other one on various aspects though. If you want to find out which one is the best for you, i suggest you learn about how they work and/or read benchmark results. Remember to stay critic to especially the latter since statistics can easily blur a choice with a false conclusion.
Personally, if i bind all the little pieces together, a common home user is better off with Ext3FS. Sure, there’s less performance, but there’s also a less problems regarding compatibility and the stability is well-tested on the Linux kernel. So if you don’t know, and don’t want to look futher, go for Ext3FS.
According to this FAQ, JFS came from OS/2. Can you provide documentation to prove the code in Linux came right from AIX?
http://oss.software.ibm.com/jfs/project/pub/faq.txt
“In December of 1999, a snapshot of the original OS/2 JFS source was taken and work was begun to port JFS to Linux.”
Another SCO fud-rucker ! ( original post, that is )
“According to this FAQ, JFS came from OS/2. Can you provide documentation to prove the code in Linux came right from AIX?
http://oss.software.ibm.com/jfs/project/pub/faq.txt
“In December of 1999, a snapshot of the original OS/2 JFS source was taken and work was begun to port JFS to Linux.””
I have been using reiser for 3 years now without any problems. I’ve been really happy with it.
I use it both on my web/db servers and my personal workstation, gentoo of course
cheers
I used reiser exclusively some time ago, used to get fatal errors from time to time. I thought it was me, or my machine all this time, altho I felt there may be something “up” with reiser. Thank you all for your time here and confirming this may not necessarily always have been the case. Ext3 now, very smooth sailing..
JFS is slower than many other filesystems (several benchmarks between EXT3FS, ReiserFS, JFS and XFS) HOWEVER, JFS strength has NEVER been speed but reliability. Its moto has always been reliability at all costs and for those in the cheap-seats who claim their 3 desktop network is a the equilant of a fortune 500, I’ve got news for you. Joe IT from Fortune 500 values his clients data and uptime more than seeing how fast transactions can speed accross at.
JFS origins come from OS/2 eCommerce Server which IIRC, the latest version available is OS/2 4.5, which includes JFS.
As for SCO, let it die a slow and glorious death. Nothing would please me more than the Canopy group walking away from this little escapade a few million worse off and a few investigations taking place over share transactions during the SCO vs. the rest of the known universe suit.