Novell OPEN ENTERPRISE SERVER - PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATION GUIDE 12-2010 Implementation Manual page 129

single directory. NSS also supports multiple data streams and rich metadata; its features are a
superset of existing file systems on the market for data stream, metadata, name space, and attribute
support.
Ext2

Legacy file system

Not journaled

POSIX access control
Ext2 does not maintain a journal, so it is generally not desirable to use it for any server that needs
high availability, with one important exception. If the server is running as a Xen VM guest, you
should format the
/boot
Systems" (http://www.novell.com/documentation/sles10/xen_admin/data/sec_xen_filesystem.html)
in the Virtualization with Xen (http://www.novell.com/documentation/sles10/xen_admin/data/
bookinfo.html) guide.
Ext3

Most popular Linux file system; limited scalability in size and number of files

Journaled

POSIX extended access control
The Ext3 file system is a journaled file system that has the widest use in Linux today. It is regarded
by many in the Linux user community as the default Linux file system. It is quite robust and quick,
although it does not scale well to large volumes or a great number of files.
A scalability feature has been added called H-trees, which significantly improved Ext3's scalability.
However, it is still not as scalable as some of the other file systems. With H-trees, it scales similarly
to NTFS. Without H-trees, Ext3 does not handle more than about 5,000 files in a directory.
Reiser

Best performance and scalability when the number of files is great and/or files are small

Journaled

POSIX extended access control
The Reiser file system is the default file system in SUSE Linux distributions. Reiser was designed to
remove the scalability and performance limitations that exist in Ext2 and Ext3 file systems.
Reiser scales and performs extremely well on Linux, outscaling Ext3 with H-trees. In addition,
Reiser was designed to use disk space very efficiently. As a result, it is the best file system on Linux
where there are a great number of small files in the file system. Because collaboration (e-mail) and
many Web servings applications have many small files, Reiser is best suited for these types of
workloads.
XFS

Best for extremely large file systems, large files, and lots of files

Journaled (an asymmetric parallel cluster file system version is also available)

POSIX extended access controls
partition with Ext2 as explained in "Paravitual Mode and Journaling File
Storage and File Systems 129