[NTLUG:Discuss] SuSE and the KDE folks (finally!) have their act together?

[Justin M. Forbes]

On Tue, Oct 06, 2009 at 10:44:46AM -0500, Chris Cox wrote:
> 
> ext4 is an "ok" filesystem, but NOTHING new.  New I suppose
> for ext3 users, but ext4 doesn't present anything compelling.
> Even recent benchmarks show crummy old reiserfs as being better
> in many ways.  Ext4 needs more work... even so, then it will
> be a ho-hum filesystem at best.  There's a reason why
> XFS and reiserfs still reign in the datacenter.
> 
ext4 is really supposed to be a small improvement over ext3.  The biggest
improvements visible to users is not having to wait hours for a few TB of
storage to be fscked.  

> I'd look to btrfs and nilfs2 to supplant ext4... and then,
> I believe that there will have to be something even more
> radically different coming in the next few years filesystem
> wise.
> 
> (begin slam)
> But ext4 will be entrenched, but that's mainly because Red
> Hat can't seem to deal with the idea of different filesystems.
> (end slam)

Ext4 will still be widely used, but even in Red Hat we have people actively
working on btrfs.  The problem is btrfs is nowhere near ready for
production and still can cause data corruption.  Maybe by Fedora 14 it will
be the default.  There was some initial discussion on ext4 vs btrfs for
Fedora 11 and btrfs just wasn't ready.  In the meantime there are many
users who are suffering from recovery times even on 1TB drives which are
very common these days.
Reisefs performs well, but has very little upstream effort to keep it
stable and fix issues.  That certainly isn't good for enterprise customers
at this point.  Even SuSE has switched from defaulting to resierfs.
XFS can be a great filesystem for large volumes, but is not as flexible for
smaller volumes.  It also seems to get a very large number of fixes where
things have broken upstream. Luckily very few of those are data corruptors,
but I wouldn't call it the pinnacle of stability either.
In the end, performance is very important, but data integrity will always
be more important.  There is no better way to lose customers than losing
their data.  I think that everyone is looking for a performance improvement
over ext3/4 but shipping something that isn't ready is just asking for
pain.

Justin M. Forbes