What does SUSE have against ext4?
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Steven_Rosenber Dec 07, 2012 4:44 PM EDT |
Carla, you mentioned that OpenSUSE doesn't either fully support or offer ext4. Do you mean they discourage it's use at all and not just for migrating to btfs? |
| tuxchick Dec 07, 2012 5:11 PM EDT |
Steven, I don't know why they're so down on Ext4. I have sent a followup question about it. |
| caitlyn Dec 07, 2012 5:47 PM EDT |
SUSE also dropped Ext4 support from from SLES/SLED as of v.. 11 SP2. They continue to support Ext3. Carla, glad to see you so active in your writing again :) |
| tuxchick Dec 07, 2012 7:17 PM EDT |
Thanks Caitlyn, what a nice thing to say! I think I have to do yet another followup-- Btrfs can span physical disks, which Ext4 cannot. Of course Ext4 can be used with LVM, but maybe there are advantages to having such functionality native to the filesystem. |
| gus3 Dec 07, 2012 9:15 PM EDT |
Ext4 cannot, but neither can ext3 nor ext2. LVM is the only way to get extN to span multiple disks/slices. |
| Steven_Rosenber Dec 07, 2012 10:29 PM EDT |
I still run ext3 on my main system. |
| caitlyn Dec 10, 2012 12:45 PM EDT |
I've used ext4 on my systems without issue but I did change to xfs on the last rebuild of my desktop due to the (admittedly obscure) ext4 bug and the fact that my distro of choice doesn't have a new enough kernel to have that bug squashed. |
| gus3 Dec 10, 2012 2:30 PM EDT |
Plus, XFS has online defrag. |
| Bob_Robertson Dec 11, 2012 10:17 AM EDT |
Wait, I thought Linux didn't need defrag? :^) |
| gus3 Dec 11, 2012 12:06 PM EDT |
Not like "some others". |
| Steven_Rosenber Dec 11, 2012 7:30 PM EDT |
How does XFS compare to ext3/4 in terms of recovering after a sudden loss of power? |
| BernardSwiss Dec 11, 2012 7:36 PM EDT |
Google, on the other hand, skipped ext3 and went straight to ext4. My amateur perusal of Wikipedia makes this seem readily comprehensible. Suse's aversion to ext4 seems harder to comprehend, unless it's perhaps an issue about Windows compatibility. |
| gus3 Dec 11, 2012 8:05 PM EDT |
Ext3 does just fine, as a fairly mature and stable FS. Ext4 (assuming the journal is present) is also pretty good, if you don't bump into the corner-case from a couple months ago. Without the journal, ext4's recovery is still faster than ext2's recovery, thanks to extent mapping, more efficient than block bitmaps. XFS has one major drawback, which may have already been addressed(*): Disk buffering can interfere with getting the journal flushed before a power failure halts the HD. When it was developed, it was for SGI's MIPS systems, which had some really big capacitors and an OS that monitored the power supply quality. If the power failed, the OS would do an emergency buffer flush while the caps held things up. PC's don't have this, so the safest Linux mount option for XFS is "sync". Bummer. (*) I haven't followed the XFS development, so the devs may have addressed this concern sometime in the recent past. |
| caitlyn Dec 12, 2012 2:25 PM EDT |
I've supported some pretty big shops that use XFS because they simply could not get the performance they needed with really large files under ext3/4 or any other filesystem available for Linux at the time. btrfs didn't exist then. Reiser and JFS did. I don't know about the issue gus3 raised either. I haven't run into the problem but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I do know there are very large enterprises that use XFS heavily on their systems. p.s.: FWIW, SalixOS 14.0 uses XFS as it's default filesystem rather than ext4. |
| caitlyn Dec 12, 2012 2:35 PM EDT |
gus3, you have impeccable timing. The bugfix for xfs you were looking for is in the 3.8 kernel: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI0OTE |
| gus3 Dec 12, 2012 3:17 PM EDT |
For once my timing was good. It's usually so bad, the only explanation I have is that it's genetic. |
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