Submitted by The 2.6.30 kernel is chock full of next-gen file systems. One such example is NILFS, a new log-structured file system that dramatically improves write performance.
The 2.6.30 kernel is chock full of next-gen file systems. One such example is NILFS, a new log-structured file system that dramatically improves write performance.
Even though I don’t run my OS from SSD anymore, I’m really looking forward to using NILFS2! Hope it will be very stable as well.
I get so disheartened when I read about all these great new SSD-focused file systems as I know full well I’ll always end up using FAT32 out of necessity because either the SSD will be used in a portable device, or I’ll want Windows compatibility for the not-so-rare occasions I lend my drive to mates.
It really is about time we moved on from FAT32 (but is this likely to happen when MS have a vested – read: patented – interest in keeping people hooked on FAT32?)
I partitioned by 1TB external drive. 1st partition is a 100MB FAT32 partition which currently holds one file, an ext3 driver for windows (http://www.fs-driver.org/). 2nd partition is the rest.
I don’t see any way around it either.
Edited 2009-06-04 19:20 UTC
Do you find the Windows ext3 driver any good?
I read somewhere it was a little glitchy so never risked it
Of the 4 times I’ve booted into Windows on my laptop the 1 time that I accessed the ext3 partition it worked fine.
Still have yet to use it on my external drive since I only use that for offline backups. I just thought if I ever wanted to bring all of my data to say my parent’s house or something it would be nice to have the driver right there on the drive.
My brother on the other hand, who isn’t very tech savvy at all was using Linux for a bit until the router got moved out of his room. His wireless wasn’t configured (shame on me I guess for not setting it up in the first place and also for letting the newb use Gentoo instead of Ubuntu). Anyway, I had him set up with dual boot so he just used used Windows with all of his data on an ext3 partition. He never had any problems. He’s been running for over a year in that configuration.
I have been using that driver for years – maybe 4 or 5 years without issue.
Systems I’ve installed for others (one partition for windows, one for data files) and they’ve never noticed any issue.
One benefit is that users can have “large files” when FAT doesn’t do big files.
As disk drives got larger some of the formatting tools create inodes that are too large and currently the driver needs an inode size of 128. This is a mkfs.ext2 -I128 option or similar…
That’s what I did for years (fat32), but I’ve turned my newest portable hdd to ntfs (almost exlcusively windows machines at work and colleagues) and use ntfs-3g at home, I had no problems yet (6 months and counting).
Fat16 is still a patent-free option, for drives <2Gb.
My problem with FAT32 wasn’t the patents* (you could use FAT32 patent free if you’re happy to loose long filename support and a couple of other work arounds), it’s teh fact that it’s massively outdated and pretty much an all round crappy FS by todays standards. So Fat16 would only inflame the situation
plus, SSD or not, who actually uses drives smaller than 2GB these days?
* though I did meantion patents in my opening post, it was more in reference to how MS have a vested interest in keeping people locked into FAT32 rather than the patent itself being the FAT32’s drawback.
I feel it’s worth pointing out that NILFS isn’t just for SSD devices. Indeed, AFAIK the principles of log structure filesystems predate the popular use of SSDs in computers.
On a conventional hard drive a log structured filesystem still has nice properties (should achieve high write bandwidth, no fsck required on unclean shutdown, similar to journalled FS, efficient snapshots / checkpoints are free).
I think it’s quite exciting to see this FS finally merged into mainline Linux. It’s not had as much publicity as btrfs but it’s still a really interesting bit of code.
There’s a lot to be said about having a lot of small tools, each good for its particular task. zfs especially and maybe btrfs seem a bit susceptible to crushing themselves trying to do way too much.
nilfs will suck performance wise on platters. Writing will be fast but the inherent massive fragmentation will kill a spinning disk setup.
I’m very interested in reformatting my netbook to nilfs2 entirely after 2.6.30 comes out and nilfs2 is deemed stable.
Edited 2009-06-05 09:30 UTC