What about these file systems: ext4, reiserfs, and jfs?

Question

I use ext3 as my file system now.
It said that these three file systems are better than ext3.
Ext4 is a successor to ext3. I think it must be better.
Reiserfs is very fast.
And jfs is effective(low usage of CPU).
Could anyone talk about the experiences of using these FSs?

Answer 1

EXT4: should mature into an awesome FS: faster than JFS, and more fault-tolerant. I'll try it one of these months.
XFS: nice. By design, it throws away files on an unclean mount, though. I never had FS corruption, but it would just up and get rid of critical files, like fstab, if I had just edited them and then had a nasty shutdown. Maybe it's a good /tmp FS?
RFS3: it used to be fast with all but large (hundreds of MB) files. IME, the maturing of the 2.6 CFQ and deadline schedulers took care of that. Fsck was never a strong point.
RFS4: what happens to a jet airplane if a bird gets sucked in an engine? It was kind of like that.
EXT3 (as a preface to JFS): from early 1998 up to late 2007, moving from 6.4 to 8.4 to 2x6.4+8.4 to 10 to 20 to 120GB, and well over 100 2000 and XP boxes serviced...I had significant corruption of NTFS FS or files all of three times, and none rendered the system unusable (it took a Win98 low-level FAT32 working trojan to do that...friggin' thing had a low threat level according to Semantic, but ate almost all my C: drive). Since moving to Linux in late '07, I've now had at least six partitions made FUBAR, and a handful that went to read-only at the slightest provocation (to give credit where it's due: I could get data off of those before wiping the partition). I've been working with itty computers lately, and EXT3 has been nothing but trouble (many hard-locks, kernel panics, app crashes while writing, etc.--a little hard on the FS). It seems to be fine on machines running all the time, that do their writing sparsely.
JFS: fast as EXT3, and seems to always recover on an unclean mount. On very slow hardware, it is definitely faster than EXT3...but I mean hardware competitive with Pentium MMXs, where EXT3 regularly maxes out the CPU. Cons? You'd best have your data backed up (but, if you trust any single copy of your data, you're asking for trouble, regardless of FS). It generally can bring your FS back to an old good state. But if not, it will happily throw files away, to make the FS itself clean quicker. So far the worst I've lost were Firefox cookies and other such goodies (never my session, luckily), but it's enough to show the possibilities.
Last edited by cerbie (2009-02-22 10:50:35)