when I installed Debian Woody I set up my root partition as ext3. I've been running with it for several months now and it seems to work well.
1) does anyone else use ext3 and, if so, what do you think of it?
2) are there any caveats regarding the use of ext3? (apart from making sure that ext3 support is in the kernel)
3) I'm thinking of converting my existing ext2 partitions to ext3, are there any circumstances where is isn't worth doing this?
4) what about other journalling fs's (ReiserFS or XFS for example), are they any better? and how hard is it to convert from ext2 to one of them?
Regards, Keith ____________ "allugThey couldn't hit an elephant at this dista..." - General John Sedgwick (American Civil War)
Keith Watson Keith.Watson@Kewill.com wrote:
- does anyone else use ext3 and, if so, what do you think of it?
I do. It used to be a bit flaky, but the latest stable kernel seems to be fine. One downside is that you can't resize it while it's mounted (at least not when I last tried), so it's not ideal with LVM.
- I'm thinking of converting my existing ext2 partitions to ext3, are
there any circumstances where is isn't worth doing this?
If you don't care about the data? ;-)
- what about other journalling fs's (ReiserFS or XFS for example), are
they any better? and how hard is it to convert from ext2 to one of them?
ReiserFS is better in some situations (I think it's lots of small files, but I can't remember for sure and it's documented out there) and can resize while mounted, but it's a dump-and-restore job to convert an ext2 disk to ReiserFS.
Hope that helps... any hackers want to do a talk on the different filesystem tricks and tools one ALUG? :-)
MJR
On Mon, 27 Jan 2003, MJ Ray wrote:
- I'm thinking of converting my existing ext2 partitions to ext3, are
there any circumstances where is isn't worth doing this?
If you don't care about the data? ;-)
- When you are using a laptop (journalling FS canes battery life)
Andrew.
I have been using ext3 for some time now. Despite a number of catastophic crashes (don't ask how..), I haven't lost any data. One advantage of ext3 is you can use rescue disk that only has ext2 support IF ever needed.
Regards, Paul.
On Monday 27 Jan 2003 2:44 pm, Keith Watson wrote:
- does anyone else use ext3 and, if so, what do you think of it?
Andrew Savory lists@andrewsavory.com wrote:
- When you are using a laptop (journalling FS canes battery life)
Depends if you have a good nvram device to put the journal in (ie not PC BIOS settings area). Does anyone know which laptops do? In any case, I suspect that setting journal options appropriately for a laptop would optimise the disk writes and save battery life... but I can't find good figures for it on ext3.
One downside is that you can't resize it while it's mounted (at least not when I last tried), so it's not ideal with LVM.
Speaking of which, I need to make several of my GNU/Linux partitions smaller to free up some space for *cough* that other OS, particularly as GNU/Linux is compact compared to the bloated other OS (and also cos it doesn't have as many games). What utilities could I use for this? I have used Partition Magic in the past which had a nice GUI and meant that even a fool like me could do it without fscking up everything. I use ext3 as well.
Ricardo Campos ricardo@corez23.com wrote:
smaller to free up some space for *cough* that other OS [...] What utilities could I use for this? [...]
I've had good results using GNU parted to do this recently, using the boot and root disk images (to avoid having the partitions mounted while resizing). Of course, I'm only resizing well-documented partitions that are common for free software users, so YMMV ;-)
http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/parted.html
MJ Ray wrote:
Andrew Savory lists@andrewsavory.com wrote:
- When you are using a laptop (journalling FS canes battery life)
Depends if you have a good nvram device to put the journal in (ie not PC BIOS settings area). Does anyone know which laptops do? In any case, I suspect that setting journal options appropriately for a laptop would optimise the disk writes and save battery life... but I can't find good figures for it on ext3.
I recall that by design ext3 polls the disk every 5 seconds (possibly longer) but not in any way that you could shutdown the disk effectivly for any length of time to actually save power.
Adam
Adam Bower abower@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
I recall that by design ext3 polls the disk every 5 seconds (possibly longer) but not in any way that you could shutdown the disk effectivly for any length of time to actually save power.
Odd. I can't actually find this, although I did find some articles that spoke about improved battery life with some ext3 data= options rather than using other journaled filesystems, and some that spoke of data corruption because of subtle flaws in some laptop harddisks. Where did you see it, can you remember?
MJR
On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 09:29:48PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
Adam Bower abower@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
I recall that by design ext3 polls the disk every 5 seconds (possibly longer) but not in any way that you could shutdown the disk effectivly for any length of time to actually save power.
Odd. I can't actually find this, although I did find some articles that spoke about improved battery life with some ext3 data= options rather than using other journaled filesystems, and some that spoke of data corruption because of subtle flaws in some laptop harddisks. Where did you see it, can you remember?
ummmm, all I can find now was people fixing it 18 months ago =) http://lwn.net/2001/0913/a/ext3.php3
"Performance: don't force a new transaction every time we sync (should prevent the writes previously happening every 5 seconds, allowing laptop drives to spin down again.)"
It is possible that I am remembering pre-this or possibly that didn't fix all of the problems. Most likely of course is that I am 18 months behind the times =)
Adam
On Mon, 27 Jan 2003 16:53:32 GMT MJ Ray markj@cloaked.freeserve.co.uk wrote:
Keith Watson Keith.Watson@Kewill.com wrote:
- does anyone else use ext3 and, if so, what do you think of it?
I do. It used to be a bit flaky, but the latest stable kernel seems to be fine. One downside is that you can't resize it while it's mounted (at least not when I last tried), so it's not ideal with LVM.
- I'm thinking of converting my existing ext2 partitions to ext3, are
there any circumstances where is isn't worth doing this?
If you don't care about the data? ;-)
- what about other journalling fs's (ReiserFS or XFS for example), are
they any better? and how hard is it to convert from ext2 to one of them?
ReiserFS is better in some situations (I think it's lots of small files, but I can't remember for sure and it's documented out there) and can resize while mounted, but it's a dump-and-restore job to convert an ext2 disk to ReiserFS.
Hope that helps... any hackers want to do a talk on the different filesystem tricks and tools one ALUG? :-)
Well I took the plunge and converted a couple of partitions to ext3 and, as it all seemed to be OK after a week, this last weekend I converted the rest. So far so good.
There's a mini-HowTo on the LDP site that's gives step by step instructions that I can recommend (URL not to hand at the moment).
Keith
Keith Watson wrote:
Well I took the plunge and converted a couple of partitions to ext3 and, as it all seemed to be OK after a week, this last weekend I converted the rest. So far so good.
We've been running ext3 on our gentoo boxes for months: no problems so far.
Cheers, Laurie.
Laurie Brown wrote:
Keith Watson wrote:
Well I took the plunge and converted a couple of partitions to ext3 and, as it all seemed to be OK after a week, this last weekend I converted the rest. So far so good.
We've been running ext3 on our gentoo boxes for months: no problems so far.
So how often do you run e2fsck against them? (if at all). What's the received wisdom on this?
Regards, Keith ____________ BAROMETER, n. An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having. Ambrose Bierce - The Devil's Dictionary
Keith Watson wrote:
Laurie Brown wrote:
Keith Watson wrote:
Well I took the plunge and converted a couple of partitions to ext3 and, as it all seemed to be OK after a week, this last weekend I converted the rest. So far so good.
We've been running ext3 on our gentoo boxes for months: no problems so far.
So how often do you run e2fsck against them? (if at all). What's the received wisdom on this?
We don't, but we probably should. It's run automatically after 20 mounts, but of course, they stay up forever... I'd be interested in opinion on this too.
Cheers, Laurie.
Laurie Brown wrote:
We don't, but we probably should. It's run automatically after 20 mounts, but of course, they stay up forever... I'd be interested in opinion on this too.
But you of course have a routine maintenance schedule don't you, where each box gets checked over for things like this every 2-3 months? ;)
FYI I have had problems with ext3 with kernels 2.4.18 and earlier, but ext3 support was still experimental. There was no data loss associated with this though, just all the files appeared to disappear on the filesystem which was fixed with a reboot, this bug was fixed in 2.4.19 and above iirc.
Adam
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Adam Bower -
Andrew Savory -
Keith Watson -
Keith Watson -
Laurie Brown -
MJ Ray -
Paul -
Ricardo Campos