BYTE Magazine > Serving With Linux > 2000 > May
Options For Linux
(Journaling File Systems For Linux: Page 5 of 7 )
By Moshe Bar
May 24, 2000
OK, you say, but how can I do journaling with my Linux box NOW?
I am getting there.
Basically, as of the writing of the article, there are two vapor options and three real options.
The vaporware products as of now are: SGI's xfs (http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/) journaling file system and Veritas' file system and volume manager (www.veritas.com). Both products were announced four or five months ago, but no code or products are yet available. SGI's xfs is based on the Irix implementation, which I have learned to respect and appreciate over the years I have worked with it. SGI announced xfs as open source software. If you read this SGI, know that we are all eagerly awaiting the fulfillment of your promise.
The two readily available journaling file systems are reiserfs and IBM's jfs. Both are open source and both are developed by very talented groups of people. In the case of jfs (see Journaled File System Technology for Linux), the developers include the four main developers of jfs for AIX.
On AIX, the jfs has withstood the test of time on large, production servers all over the world. It is reliable, fast, and easy to use. Reiserfs, on the other hand implements new concepts such as unified name spaces, which are very promising (see Namesys for more details).
Some distributions already include the reiserfs file-system option at installation time. With the new SuSE 6.4 distro it is really easy to set up a file system with reiserfs on it. The latest version is 3.5.12 and some hackers out there made some benchmarking tests with reiserfs with very encouraging results.
The tests were done with "postmark" benchmarking, 50.000 transactions with 20.000 files.
Results:
Sun E450 1 GB, Solaris 2.6, and vxfs (Veritas) file system: 22 transactions/second
Sun E450 1 GB, Solaris 2.6, and UFS file system: 23 transactions/second
Dual P-III, 1 GB Linux 2.2.13, standard ext2: 93 transactions/second
Dual P-III, 1 GB Linux 2.2.13, reiserfs 3.5.5 journaling beta: 196 transactions/second
Dual P-III, 1 GB Linux 2.2.13, reiserfs 3.5.5 journaling beta, mount options notail,
genericread: 847 transactions/second
(The Sun box used a barracuda disk and the x86 used a cheeta disk).
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