Re: File Access speed using a ext3 partition

[Ben Goren <ben@trumpetpower.com>]

On Fri, Mar 08, 2002 at 02:55:42PM -0500, Sam Stern wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> For  some  time  now,  I've been  playing  around  with  several
> Linux  distributions  and decided  to  return  my fileserver  to
> OpenBSD. However, my main file archive is  about 60GB on a 80 GB
> EXT3 partition. I  would rather  not copy  everything over  to a
> native OpenBSD  partition. So the question arises:  how good (or
> bad) is  the file access  speed in  OpenBSD 3.0 when  reading an
> Ext2/Ext3 partition? Also, is  this safe to do --  are there any
> issues when  reading and writing an  EXT3 (which is ext2  with a
> journal ) disk?

First, OpenBSD  only supports ext2,  not ext3. mount(8)  will tell
you which  filesystems are  and are  not supported;  the following
link has more information on the topic:

    http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq8.html#Journaling

As I  recall, a properly-unmounted  ext3 filesystem can  be safely
mounted as an ext2 filesystem--though, of course, you'll loose all
the benefits of journaling.

But,  more to  the point,  I'm not  aware of  an operating  system
which handles  non-native filesystem  x as  well as  the operating
system which  uses that  filesystem natively. Support  for foreign
filesystems should, as  a rule with few  exceptions, be considered
a  file  exchange and  compatibility  mechanism,  not a  preferred
substitute.

You do  make backups of this  data, no? If you do,  just make sure
the backup is up-to-date, format  the disk, use OpenBSD's very own
newfs, and restore.

If you don't make backups, then you obviously don't care about the
data.  Use  ext2 and expect  that, some  day, you'll lose  all the
data. Whether  that  loss  comes from  ext2's  inherent  problems,
OpenBSD's implementation  of ext2 (I'm  not aware of  any problems
there,  but, again,  it's not  what the  developers pay  a lot  of
attention to),  or the proverbial  bolt from the blue,  you *will*
lose the data if you don't make backups.

> Yours,
>
> Sam Stern
> Bethesda, MD, USA

Likewise,

b&

--
Ben Goren
 mailto:ben@trumpetpower.com
 http://www.trumpetpower.com/
 icbm:33o25'37"N_111o57'32"W

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