hope for the non-reiserfs stricken: the ext3 plunge
i just finished listening to Stephen Tweedie's little talk about the ext3
file system (check out http://olstrans.sourceforge.net for several other
interesting technical talks about Linux kernel developments) and decided
to take the plunge. i know that a lot of folks here have started using
ReiserFS and that it's a fine file system. however, having quite a number
of existing installations that all have ext2 file systems right now, i
thought that ext3 was a good "upgrade" path towards a journalling file
system that shouldn't be dismissed immediately. and so, i took the plunge.
like a lot of stuff, ext3 is beta. the most recent version being 0.06b.
it's possible that you might lose data in the process, though i haven't
yet.
my base system
for starters, i am using a debian testing/unstable system, which has
been progressively upgraded from debian 2.0 to 2.1 to 2.2 all without
complete reinstalls. many thanks to debian's dpkg and apt-get programs for
making it quite easy. of course, as expected of the unstable branch, there
were occasional hitches, but nothing horribly disastrous.
i had used apt-get to obtain kernel-sources-2.2.19pre17. yes, i don't use
bleeding edge 2.4.x yet. maybe when i've stopped screaming at clueless
co-workers to learn new technology, i'll have time to do that carefully.
after getting the kernel sources on my box, i proceeded to apply my other
patches, lpp (linux progress patch), udf and other kernel linked goodies
like my sound driver (alsa fm801) and the NVidia kernel goo. i've used
that kernel with patches for a couple of weeks(months(?)) now so i'm
fairly comfortable with it. nothing else out of the ordinary.
i downloaded the ext3 0.06b tarball from the primary source and applied
the diffs to the kernel source using patch. patch complained at several
points because of my udf patch and because i was using 2.2.19pre17 instead
of 2.2.19pre14. that wasn't a problem since reading the .rej files pointed
me to what the problems were and were easily fixed by hand editing the
problem spots. after fixing the modified files, a quick make dep, make
install, make modules, make modules_install and i had a spanking new
kernel with ext3 mods. :)
all i did after that was follow Stephen's README, created the journals for
the filesystems i wanted to bump up to ext3 and voila. i now have ext3
filesystems. a little bit more into the README and i now had an ext3
rootfs. pretty neat since i could now press the reset button and not
suffer the e2fsck penalty we usually get in pre-journaled file system
kernels. it's also handy since that last power-failure here in luzon that
just messed with our computers and possibly wrecked many a filesystem.
the nice thing about current debian is, although the ext3 patches haven't
been folded into the kernel yet, the ext2 tools are already ext3 aware. so
i didn't need to download any other utils to migrate to ext3. of course,
if your ext2 utils are newer than v1.1.6, you'd have no trouble migrating
to ext3 either.
i'll probably give reiserfs a spin sometime when i have a new hard disk or
something. though given the number of systems with existing ext2
partitions and no spare disks around to backup to, ext3 is a good
candidate for those who may need or want a journaled file system on their
boxes.
___ eric pareja ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ~-=[O]=-~ Here, have a clue. Get the picture.
\@/ PGP key at http://gra.ph/~xenos/xenos.pgp <|PLUG|> http://gra.ph
v "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
- Emperor Cleon in "Foundation's Fear" by Gregory Benford
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