There is another option for journaling file systems, finally. The successor to ext2, called ext3fs is right now under development under the leadership of star Linux kernel hacker Stephen Tweedie.
Ext3fs is still in beta, like both reiserfs and jfs, but it works very well. Stephen is predicting summer 2000 for production use of ext3fs. Nice features include the fact that ext3fs is backward compatible with older versions of ext2. In addition, ext3fs uses asynchronous journaling, which means the performance will be as good or better than ext2fs.
To install it, you would follow much the same procedure as for jfs and reiserfs. To get the patches, go to: ftp://ftp.uk.linux.org/pub/linux/sct/fs/jfs.
As with reiserfs, ext3fs is going to be part of the standard kernel soon, if not with version 2.4 due out this summer, most probably.
Final Remarks
As of now, it is really hard to say which journaling file system of the trio jfs, ext3fs and reiserfs is going to win the race. It is also conceivable that there is a market for more than one file system. Due to my involvement with jfs, I feel at home with jfs and believe it is going to be a very valid alternative.
Today, reiserfs has a larger following because SuSE has been shipping it with its distros 6.3 and 6.4 for awhile now. It is widely expected that SGI's xfs is going to be a very fast contended once actual code comes out. If you need a journaling file system now, you might want to try reiserfs. 
Moshe Bar is an Israeli system administrator and OS researcher, who started learning Unix on a PDP-11 with AT&T Unix Release 6 back in 1981. He holds an M.Sc in computer science. Visit his website at http://www.moelabs.com/
For more of Moshe's columns, visit the Serving With LinuxIndex Page
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