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  • From: Phil/CERisE/KG6MBQ <cerise AT littlegreenmen.armory.com>
  • To: Ari Steinberg <ari.steinberg AT stanford.edu>
  • Cc: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] fresh install questions
  • Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 01:41:08 -0700 (PDT)

Ari Steinberg said:

> First, filesystems - what should I use? Is Reiser faster than ext3 (or
> should I try xfs or something else?)? Any drawbacks I should know about
> with any of them?

Reiser and XFS are faster than ext3. I believe that XFS is a bit
faster than Reiser.
ext3 is slow, but stable.
Reiser has had a number of complaints about stability. It's
optimized for large numbers of small files.
XFS has no complaints that I know of, but hasn't officially become a
part of the kernel. As a result, you have to patch the kernel. It's
advisable in my experience to change the global makefile to ensure that
the resultant kernel is version 2.4.18 instead of 2.4.18-xfs-1.1. This
isn't actually a daunting task.
I use XFS. I've been very happy with it.
One other thing to note...These filesystems are increasingly less
forgiving of a sudden shutdown/crash. When I was dorking around with
the kernel, I occasionally had a file which was open at the time wiped
out as a result. It wipes it out in a unique way though...It fills it
with binary zeroes...

> One thing that I've done in the past is actually make a pretty big (50% of
> the drive) fat32 partition for my mp3's and whatnot, this way I can access
> it in windows if I ever needed to. However, I've definitely been cutting
> back significantly on my windows usage, so I could definitely see going
> with one of the aforementioned file systems for this. I know fat32 is
> quite a bit inferior to all of the aforementioned journaled fs's, but
> specifically what would I lose by going fat32? How much of a disadvantage
> is it to have mp3's/movies/documents on a fat32 partition as opposed to
> ext3/reiser/whatever?

FAT32 is a joke by comparison. A knock-knock joke. It's old and
it's really not funny any more.
FAT32 will have slower disk access due to fragmentation. It takes
longer to recover in case of a fatal shutdown. It tends to waste disk
space (on average, half of each block is unused).
Ummm...I think that's the full laundry list.

> Lastly, how are those updated init files coming? I'm kind of thinking
> maybe I should hold off on this install until I know that I won't have to
> do a fresh reinstall to get a full migration to SM 1.x...and since it's not
> really urgent that I use my computer over the summer, I am willing to wait
> a bit. Roughly how far are we from hitting SM 0.8 (or whatever the first
> "1.0 beta" is being called nowadays)?

I can't really speak for that. What I can say is that if you're
going to run it for any amount of time, I'm sure that you'll find less
and less interest in the current version number. I installed Slack 7.0
a good long while ago and found myself diverging from their upgrades.
I'd tend to say to install it now. It would be quite an oversight
if a spell wasn't included to change init files around should the need
arise.

-Phil/CERisE





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