| Bill Jonas on Mon, 18 Mar 2002 23:20:12 +0100 |
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On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 12:18:21PM -0500, Doug Crompton wrote: > What are the differences between ext3 and reiserFS? Why would one choose > one over the other? Does the boot partition need to be maintained as ext2? There are internal technical differences between ext3 and Reiser, but the main difference from a user standpoint is that ext3 is backward-compatible with ext2. This makes it handy when another OS has ext2 support (or has utilities available that let you access an ext2 partition), or if you have a boot disk with an older kernel or one without ext3 support. The only gotcha is that the filesystem in question must have been cleanly unmounted for this to work. You can also switch back and forth between ext2 and ext3. To convert from 2->3, just run "tune2fs -j /dev/device" (or "tune2fs -O has_journal /dev/device"). To go the other way, use "tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/device". (The filesystem in question should be unmounted at the time, or at the very least mounted read-only.) Compare this to ReiserFS, which requires you to back up your data (if you want to save it), make a new filesystem, and restore your backup if you're converting from ext2. The boot partition does not need to be an ext2 partition; hell, I suppose it could be an MSDOS or UMSDOS partition, if one were so inclined. But there's really no need for it to be a journalling filesystem. Journals take up disk space (I believe that the ext3 default is 16M (though this can be adjusted) and the ReiserFS default is 32M (not adjustable to my knowledge).) Considering that the boot partition is generally a few megs, e2fsck takes but a few seconds on a filesystem of that size, and the boot partition is very seldom changed, there's no real benefit to it. Nothing to stop you from doing it, though, and no harm will come to your system if you decide to change it. That said, I like both ext3 and ReiserFS and have used both. Their relative strengths lie in different areas. Right tool for the job and all that. -- Bill Jonas * bill@billjonas.com * http://www.billjonas.com/ Developer/SysAdmin for hire! See http://www.billjonas.com/resume.html Attachment:
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