Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Linux: Journaling Filesystems (Difference Between Ext2 and Ext3 Filesystem)

Journaling filesystems offer several important advantages over static filesystems, such as ext2. In particular, if the system is halted without a proper shutdown, they guarantee consistency of the data and eliminate the need for a long and complex filesystem check during rebooting. The term journaling derives its name from the fact that a special file called a journal is used to keep track of the data that has been written to the hard disk.

In the case of conventional filesystems, disk checks during rebooting after a power failure or other system crash can take many minutes, or even hours for large hard disk drives with capacities of hundreds of gigabytes. Moreover, if an inconsistency in the data is found, it is sometimes necessary for human intervention in order to answer complicated questions about how to fix certain filesystem problems. Such downtime can be very costly with big systems used by large organizations.

In the case of a journaling filesystem, if power supply to the computer is suddenly interrupted, a given set of updates will have either been fully committed to the filesystem (i.e., written to the hard disk), in which case there is not a problem, and the filesystem can be used immediately, or the updates will have been marked as not yet fully committed, in which case the file system driver can read the journal and fix any inconsistencies that occurred. This is far quicker than a scan of the entire hard disk, and it guarantees that the structure of the filesystem is always self-consistent. With a journaling filesystem, a computer can usually be rebooted in just a few seconds after a system crash, and although some data might be lost, at least it will not take many minutes or hours to discover this fact.

Ext3 has been integrated into the Linux kernel since version 2.4.16 and has become the default filesystem on Red Hat and some other distributions. It is basically an extension of ext2 to which a journaling capability has been added, and it provides the same high degree of reliability because of the exhaustively field-proven nature of its underlying ext2. Also featured is the ability for ext2 partitions to be converted to ext3 and vice-versa without any need for backing up the data and repartitioning. If necessary, an ext3 partition can even be mounted by an older kernel that has no ext3 support; this is because it would be seen as just another normal ext2 partition and the journal would be ignored.

ReiserFS, developed by Hans Reiser and others, was actually the first journaling filesystem added to the Linux kernel. As was the case with ext2, it was designed from the ground up for use in Linux. However, unlike ext3, it was also designed from the ground up as a journaling filesystem rather than as an add-on to an existing filesystem, and thus it is widely considered to be the most advanced of the native Linux journaling filesystems. Features include high speed, excellent stability and the ability to pack small files into less disk space than is possible with many other filesystems.
A new version of ReiserFS, designated Reiser4, is a complete rewrite from version 3 and is said to result in major improvements in performance, including higher speeds, the ability to accommodate more CPUs, built-in encryption and ease of customization.

JFS was originally developed by IBM in the mid-1990s for its AIX Unix operating system, and it was later ported to the company's OS/2 operating system. IBM subsequently changed the licensing of the OS/2 implementation to open source, which led to its support on Linux. JFS is currently used primarily on IBM enterprise servers, and it is also a good choice for systems that multiboot Linux and OS/2.

XFS was developed in the mid-1990s by Silicon Graphics (SGI) for its 64 bit IRIX Unix servers. These servers were designed with advanced graphics processing in mind, and they feature the ability to accommodate huge files sizes. The company likewise converted XFS to open source, after which it was also adopted by Linux. Because it is a 64-bit filesystem, XFS features size limitations in the millions of terabytes (in contrast to the still generous 4TB limit of ext2).
Most Linux distributions that ship with 2.4.x and later kernels support ext2, ext3 and ReiserFS. Support for JFS has been added to the 2.4.20 and 2.5.6 kernels, and XFS was added to the 2.5.36 kernel. JFS and XFS support can be added to earlier kernels by downloading the appropriate patches from the respective websites and compiling as a module or into the kernel. Partitions can then be converted by backing up the data, creating the new filesystem and then restoring the data.


Note that this document comes without warranty of any kind. But every effort has been made to provide the information as accurate as possible. I welcome emails from any readers with comments, suggestions, and corrections at webmaster_at admin@linuxhowto.in

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3 comments:

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