Filesystems (ext3, reiser, xfs, jfs) comparison on Debian Etch (DebianAdministration) [LWN.net]

Filesystems (ext3, reiser, xfs, jfs) comparison on Debian Etch (DebianAdministration)

Posted Apr 27, 2006 9:23 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433)
In reply to: Filesystems (ext3, reiser, xfs, jfs) comparison on Debian Etch (Debian Administration) by sbergman27
Parent article: Filesystems (ext3, reiser, xfs, jfs) comparison on Debian Etch (Debian Administration)

I believe there's also an experimental filesystem called TuxFS. It guarantees integrity without journaling :-)

Basically, it never overwrites a live file. Any changes, it writes the modified block out in full somewhere else. Then it rewrites the updated file header out in full somewhere else. Then the directory header ...

Until finally it rewrites the root block. The only time there's any danger is if it goes down while writing the root block. At all other times, the root block is pointing at a completely valid filesystem. If the system crashes, all updates since the last root block update are lost because the modified blocks are orphaned. But all previous data is safe, because data is never modified "in situ".

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Filesystems (ext3, reiser, xfs, jfs) comparison on Debian Etch (DebianAdministration)

Posted Apr 27, 2006 12:01 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Downside: a minor problem with fragmentation. :)))

(The extra disk overhead can be disregarded as long as you have decent amounts of cache, because disk writes are generally localized in the directory tree anyway. At least they are if atime updates are disabled. Using a filesystem like this with atime updates enabled strikes me as... perhaps unwise.)