FreeBSD‘s Robert Watson says that effective today, newfs(8) and sysinstall(8) will create UFS2 file systems by default, unless explicitly specified.
UFS2 Now the Default Creation Type on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
5.0 is getting there! Can’t wait to get my mits on 5.1-RELEASE though ;o) Good work FreeBSD-team!
As UFS1 was the default, I’m sure many have installed 5 believing without a second thought that UFS2 would be used on all of their filesystems. These people are likely to notice an unexpected performance hit when 5.1 comes along with UFS2 as default.
“an unexpected performance hit when 5.1 comes along with UFS2 as default”
perfomance hit == perfomance loss
Claim to back up your claim that UFS2 is slower than UFS1 ?
…can someone please comment on the differences between the two?
Thanks,
—
3lixyqueue
As far as I know, UFS1 and UFS2 are similar. However, UFS2 was designed with ACLs and extended attributes in mind while this support for UFS1 was somehow bolted on as an afterthought. The main performance gains of UFS2 will be for those that use ACLs (and extended attributes).
This is especially important for Samba users since windows needs both ACLs and extended attributes. Samba has always had some problems with things like hidden files and what not (before ACL support).
Anyways, I’m not a filesystem guru, so if someone else would like to give better description it’d be appreciated.
As UFS1 was the default, I’m sure many have installed 5 believing without a second thought that UFS2 would be used on all of their filesystems. These people are likely to notice an unexpected performance hit when 5.1 comes along with UFS2 as default.
Or they could simply reinstall their systems again…
There aren’t that many performance characteristics which are different between UFS1 and 2. It’s largely a matter of maximum filesystem size and extended attributes.
Hmm… When I installed 5.0-RELEASE a couple days ago, it was noted in the installer that I should not choose UFS2 unless I had a 64-bit machine, so I chose UFS1 (the default). Was the installer’s warning mistaken?
But grub does not recognize UFS2 yet. Fans should be going for default bootmgr for dualbooting.