On Fri, 03 Feb 2006 11:22:51 +1300 Volker Kuhlmann wrote: > > Because on a 300G hard drive and an old bios, i wanted to ensure that > > the kernel is somewhere where the bios can find it. > > I think you'll find that you no longer need it. Bioses since 2000 > should be fine, for a multimedia box you wouldn't want anything older > than that anyway.
Not sure how old it is, and it's not strictly a multimedia box - it isn't playing the files, merely storing them and serving them. > > Of course, the installer should create it automatically if (and only if) > needed. I am the borg installer. gentoo remember :-) > > > Any quick pointers on why you say that (and are you suggesting 3 or 4?) > > I thought you said you had trouble with ext3...? ;) > > I've been using reiser3 for donkeys years and it's been rock-solid. > > Reiser4 isn't in the kernel yet, Hans is getting impatient but the Linux > people (notably GKH) don't like the way the source code is formatted - I > don't have much sympathy with that sort of nonsense. > > Reiser has significant speed advantage for handling of many small files > I hear, it matters for /home and mail spools. For your mpegs not so much > of an issue. > Thanks for the comments, cheers. > > > XFS was designed specifically to support media files. > > http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/ > > http://www.sgi.com/products/software/xfs/ > I have my doubts about the suitability of XFS. Here is the summary of filesystems from the gentoo install docs. I don't take this as gospel, there is, as alluded by Volker, a degree of subjectivity and over generalisation in assessing these things. FWIW heres what the gentoo people have to say: <quote> The Linux kernel supports various filesystems. We'll explain ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, XFS and JFS as these are the most commonly used filesystems on Linux systems. ext2 is the tried and true Linux filesystem but doesn't have metadata journaling, which means that routine ext2 filesystem checks at startup time can be quite time-consuming. There is now quite a selection of newer-generation journaled filesystems that can be checked for consistency very quickly and are thus generally preferred over their non-journaled counterparts. Journaled filesystems prevent long delays when you boot your system and your filesystem happens to be in an inconsistent state. ext3 is the journaled version of the ext2 filesystem, providing metadata journaling for fast recovery in addition to other enhanced journaling modes like full data and ordered data journaling. ext3 is a very good and reliable filesystem. It has an additional hashed b-tree indexing option that enables high performance in almost all situations. You can enable this indexing by adding -O dir_index to the mke2fs command. In short, ext3 is an excellent filesystem. ReiserFS is a B*-tree based filesystem that has very good overall performance and greatly outperforms both ext2 and ext3 when dealing with small files (files less than 4k), often by a factor of 10x-15x. ReiserFS also scales extremely well and has metadata journaling. As of kernel 2.4.18+, ReiserFS is solid and usable as both general-purpose filesystem and for extreme cases such as the creation of large filesystems, the use of many small files, very large files and directories containing tens of thousands of files. XFS is a filesystem with metadata journaling which comes with a robust feature-set and is optimized for scalability. We only recommend using this filesystem on Linux systems with high-end SCSI and/or fibre channel storage and an uninterruptible power supply. Because XFS aggressively caches in-transit data in RAM, improperly designed programs (those that don't take proper precautions when writing files to disk and there are quite a few of them) can lose a good deal of data if the system goes down unexpectedly. JFS is IBM's high-performance journaling filesystem. It has recently become production-ready and there hasn't been a sufficient track record to comment positively nor negatively on its general stability at this point. </quote> Source: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/2005.1/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=4 > Interesting, I guess that's about timing. What puts me off XFS is the > esoteric character, esp of the surrounding tools. I don't see a need to > switch either. > > > ( [...] an informed discussion > > on the subject of file systems would be interesting. ) > > Yes, but difficult. For assessing reliability you'd need a lot of data > points (some guy saying "it shat itself yesterday" means nothing by > itself), for speed tests you'd need to run it side-by-side on the same > hardware under same conditions. That leaves "other factors" for making > your choice... > > Volker > -- Nick Rout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
