JFS experiences?

[Charles Steinkuehler]

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Jason D. Clinton wrote:

> I ran ReiserFSv3 on several servers in the past and was bitten by a number of 
> corner case bugs introduced by (pre-Novell) SuSE. ReiserFSv4 is still 
> considered experimental by its team.

I don't have any experience with Reiser

> XFS has gained recent notoriety for losing the data of some prominent Linux 
> figures. I remember that in the past few months, at least five people on 
> various Planet aggregations said that XFS lost their entire partition and the 
> recovery tools did not work.

I tried XFS for a while, but couldn't get a system stable enough to get
through the install process, so I managed to side-step most of the data
loss issues.  I can vouch for XFS being unstable (circa Debian sarge)
and the recovery tools not helping.

> So, having heard very little about JFS, I'm interested in knowing if anyone 
> here has been running it and has any experiences to share.

I've been running JFS (via Debian Sarge) since the release of Sarge on
various platforms (x86 and 64-bit on AMD64).  I've only had a couple of
issues:

1) Although grub claims to have JFS support, it didn't seem to work in
the real world, so my /boot partition is ext3 (everything else,
including root, is on JFS).  This may already be fixed by more recent
versions of grub.

2) One system foo-bar'd the JFS filesystem when it completely filled the
allocated space (before I noticed and could allocate more via LVM).  I
lost a few files that were open for writing at the time (mostly log
files), and I had to run the fsck utilities a couple of times (until I
manually forced complete checks of the entire FS, despite the fact that
the journal indicated the FS was OK), but nothing major.  Pretty much
everything was back to normal once I added space and properly fsck'd. I
have completely filled other JFS partitions (ie: /home/DVDs) with no
issues whatsoever (ie: delete a few files and go back to work).

NOTE:  I'm running most systems with JFS on LVM on SW-RAID (1 or 5).  A
couple of systems have HW-RAID (3-Ware 95xx SATA controllers), and
everything seems to get along nicely.

- --
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net
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