[mythtv-users] ext4 vs XFS for mythbuntu

Daniel Kristjansson danielk at cuymedia.net
Sat Jan 24 20:34:54 UTC 2009


On Wed, 2009-01-21 at 13:01 -0500, Chuck Peters wrote:
> I am about to install ubuntu/mythbuntu on a new server and now that
> ubuntu jaunty/9.04 has ext4 I was wondering if I should use ext4 for
> the OS and/or myth data partitions.  What do you think?

ext4 might be a good experiment, but for production I would still
recommend XFS. I also highly recommend running a defragmentation
utility nightly with either filesystem. XFS has a very nice on-line
defrag utility where you just specify the time for each run;
I allocate 2 hours. ext4 has it's own on-line defrag utility
e4defrag, I don't know much about it, but would recommend that
you give it a go as MythTV will defeat the fragmentation prevention
algorithms in all modern filesystems.

PS I would personally use ext3 for OS and code partitions, this is
what I do now. It handles unclean mounts very well. With XFS if you
crash all files open for writing are zeroed. This is the safe thing
to do of course, but as a developer I usually have the code file
that caused the crash open in my editor when a crash happens.. it
is very nice to have that file when I return, even if it gets
corrupted in some way. (Note this is just the default for ext3, if
you change the options to make it a little faster you get the XFS
behaviour, but for obvious reason I don't use ext3 for any partition
that need to be fast.)

-- Daniel



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