Major File Systems In Linux - Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE DESKTOP 10 SP2 - DEPLOYMENT GUIDE 08-05-2008 Deployment Manual

it obsoletes the lengthy search process that checks the entire file system at system
start-up. Instead, only the journal is replayed.

22.2 Major File Systems in Linux

Unlike two or three years ago, choosing a file system for a Linux system is no longer
a matter of a few seconds (Ext2 or ReiserFS?). Kernels starting from 2.4 offer a variety
of file systems from which to choose. The following is an overview of how these file
systems basically work and which advantages they offer.
It is very important to bear in mind that there may be no file system that best suits all
kinds of applications. Each file system has its particular strengths and weaknesses,
which must be taken into account. Even the most sophisticated file system cannot replace
a reasonable backup strategy, however.
The terms data integrity and data consistency, when used in this chapter, do not refer
to the consistency of the user space data (the data your application writes to its files).
Whether this data is consistent must be controlled by the application itself.
IMPORTANT: Setting Up File Systems
Unless stated otherwise in this chapter, all the steps required to set up or
change partitions and file systems can be performed using YaST.
22.2.1 ReiserFS
Officially one of the key features of the 2.4 kernel release, ReiserFS has been available
as a kernel patch for 2.2.x SUSE kernels since version 6.4. ReiserFS was designed by
Hans Reiser and the Namesys development team. It has proven itself to be a powerful
alternative to Ext2. Its key assets are better disk space utilization, better disk access
performance, and faster crash recovery.
ReiserFS's strengths, in more detail, are:
Better Disk Space Utilization
In ReiserFS, all data is organized in a structure called B
structure contributes to better disk space utilization because small files can be stored
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-balanced tree. The tree