[Novalug] ext4 vs. ext3 vs. ext2

Jon LaBadie novalugml@jgcomp.com
Mon Sep 7 17:06:08 EDT 2009


On Mon, Sep 07, 2009 at 04:53:22PM -0400, James Ewing Cottrell 3rd wrote:
> Adding a journal is as simple as adding a -j flag to mke2fs.
> 
> Journaling is ALWAYS useful, as ANY unclean shutdown will for an Entire 
> Scan, even if there is no corruption, whereas the Journal will assure 
> that you scan No more Than is Needed.
> 
> The lone exception I would make for Journals would be Flash Drives, 
> altho I recently read a paper which said that their overhead was pretty 
> negligible.
> 
> What IS of great use is to use "noatime" on EVERY filesystem. Unless you 
> have a specific reason, atime is Essentially Useless.
> 
> And I am baffled by relatime...what does it accomplish?
> 

If I understand it correctly, linux's noatime doesn't
update atime at all.  relatime is more like the noatime
in Solaris, atime is updated only if ctime or mtime is
also being updated.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon@jgcomp.com
 JG Computing
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 Reston, VA  20194		(703) 787-0922 (fax)



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