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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.eng.convex.com!newshost.convex.com!bcm.tmc.edu!news.msfc.nasa.gov!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!news.technocom.co.uk!morse.ukonline.co.uk!bath.ac.uk!aber!innews From: pcg@aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.development.system Subject: Re: The better (more suitable)Unix?? FreeBSD or Linux Date: 06 Feb 1996 20:22:54 +0000 Organization: Prifysgol Cymru, Aberystwyth Lines: 41 Sender: pcg@osfb.aber.ac.uk Message-ID: <vwj7my0xkyp.fsf@osfb.aber.ac.uk> References: <4er9hp$5ng@orb.direct.ca> <311250C2.2781E494@public.uni-hamburg.de> <strenDM7Gr4.Cn2@netcom.com> Reply-To: pcg@aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) NNTP-Posting-Host: osfb.aber.ac.uk In-reply-to: stren@netcom.com's message of Sat, 3 Feb 1996 15:09:04 GMT X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.0.13 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:13353 comp.os.linux.development.system:16732 >>> On Sat, 3 Feb 1996 15:09:04 GMT, stren@netcom.com (Sam Trenholme) said: stren> Hmmm.... I remeber a long thread where people were arguing this-- and I stren> get the sense that FFS was faster than Ext2Fs. Not quite: probably the Linux EXT2FS and the device drivers that do clustering are quite a bit faster than the FFS, but the buffer cache code tends to throw away the advantage because it has some higher overhead. stren> 1) I like the idea of LFS, becuase it looks like it should survive hard stren> crashes and power cycles happening without a proper shutdown/unmount stren> sequence-- better. I hear the commerical filesystem VeritasFS is really stren> good at this. Well, you are perhaps confusing two different things: a log structured file system, like the Sprite LFS, and a filesystem with an update log. A log structured file system organizes _files_ as a log, and is in general a bad idea except on single tasking machines, or single user machines where there is in general only one task writing to the disk. A filesystem that does logging instead can be _any_ filesystem where the updates to the data and metadata are logged; the presence of a log allows one to largely dispense with things like fsck, for in case of recovery one just replays the forward log, or the backward log. Both the System V filesystem and the BSD filesystem have been been log'ified, by commercial companies. One of the veritas filesystem products is one such System V log'ified silesystem (another is an extent based filesystem that also has logging). I suspect that is would be fairly easy to add logging to the EXT2 filesystem; perhaps it would make a suitable master's project. stren> 2) I would love to see a Unix filesystem with dynamiclly allocated stren> inodes. Nothing more fun than "no space on device" errors, even stren> though I have 25 megs left, because I just ran out of inodes. :-) Perhaps you should just run you news spool on an HPFS partition; too bad that there is yet no support for writing to one.