[PLUG] most stable filesystem?

[Christopher N. Deckard]

Define stable.  Most filesystems are stable for normal use.  Ext2 has 
some issues currently in the 2.4 kernel (at least I've seen some people 
have issues with it (and my sparc is dead currently because of it.)) 
ReiserFS has gotten pretty good, but if you are using it with NFS under 
high load there are issues.

If you mean by "I run a server with 1000 users who are doing work all 
the time and I want to turn the power off and expect ZERO file 
corruption or lost data" then you need to be writing your own OS and 
filesystem.

The most "stable" file systems in terms of being able to recover from a 
crash will be probably ext2 or reiserfs.  The difference being the 
ReiserFS is a journalling filesystem.  So when your computer is rebooted 
after a crash or powerfailure the FS doesn't have to be checked (fsck). 
  All the journal does is keeps filesystem integrity.  It knows if a 
file was completed being written or not.

There are lots of options that you can give "mount" to mount your 
filesystems in different ways.  Some of them have no buffering by the OS 
and therefor write when a file is written.  But there are pros and cons 
to every option.

Personally I'm happy running 2.4.2 + reiserfs.  You would probably be 
the most stable on the latest 2.2 kernel and sticking only with ext2. 
All of the other filesystems are not native linux filesystems and 
therefor have bugs or low performance (vfat for example.)

Good luck in your quest for a stable filesystem.  I normally don't say 
this but you may want to look at FreeBSD or OpenBSD.

-Chris

Fred Davis wrote:

> after having my linux partition corrupted, and luckily restoring most of
> the important stuff in /home w/ e2fsck, I do not want to deal with this
> again...
> 
> so now that I'm going to reinstall the system, what is the most
> stable filesystem currently available for linux, and what distro is it
> easiest to install it in?
> 
> -fred