I am writing up a specification for proposed LVM support for Yoper. In
my research, the subject of filesystem types came to mind. From what I
can tell, Yoper currently supports the following:
ext2
ext3
reiserfs
reiser4
xfs
An important factor I see in creating an LVM-based system is the ability
to resize the fileystems while they are online. (mounted) This is
possible with XFS, ext3, and reiserfs. This is not supported for reiser4
or ext2. I also noticed that JFS is missing from this list. This is
another filesystem that allows online resizing.
Although not a lot of linux users are familiar with LVM, AIX users have
been familiar with it from day one. The idea of only creating your
filesystems as large as necessary and just adding more space when needed
has become commonplace. I have often made the mistake of creating a
filesystem too big while another is too small. If I was using
partitions, there is not much I can do. However, with LVM, I can resize
the logical volumes and resize the filesystems on the fly. On AIX, it's
a simple command line option or a user can use their sysadmin tools
called smit. This is similar to "yast" and close to the post-install
tools we want YIS to become.
After some research, it appears that most distros are hesitant to
include support for reiser4 and here are a few examples why:
GRUB does not support reiser4
online resize is not available (the creators of *Reiser4* say they will
implement these if someone pays them to do so. - wikipedia)
VFS does not fully support reiser4
Issues with hardlinks
Unable to backup metadata
I'm sure there are other problems, and I am equally sure someone has
patched the problems I listed and I will get a reply like "that's not an
issue anymore" :-). However, I think it comes down to priorities. Should
we support a filesystem that is "on the fringe" when there is no real
benefit to take on the added support requests? I recommend we drop
reiser4 and add JFS. JFS was created and is supported by a core team at
IBM. JFS is under the GPL and has a loyal user base. It's stable and
supported by most major distributions.(been in the kernel longer than
xfs) It also supports online resizing :-)
I would like to get the opinion of others and discuss other pros/cons to
supporting reiser4 and/or JFS.
Thanks,
David Huffman (bigredradio)
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