Can Anyone Explain the Linux Filesystems? (ext2, ext3, swap)

Vehementi

Vehementi

Posts: 2,644   +2
Pretty self explanatory, I want to know things like the cluster sizes, comparibility in speed and other such things to FAT32 and NTFS, and partition size limits, losing space, etc.
I'd especially like to know the difference between ext2 and ext3. Which one's better, newer, faster, specialized, etc.
And what some effective partitioning strategies would be. Or does it not matter? What about fragmentation? Data recovery?

Boy I ask alot of questions, for I am young and set on the path of gaining knowledge :D
 
Veh,

There's really not a good answer to that question. Ext2 and Ext3 are both good filesystems - the differences. Well to keep this post short I'll just point you to a pretty good information page about ext3. It goes into the details of how the filesystem works. As far as a comparison to NTFS - well there really isn't a comparison.

Here's the page:

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/4136/4/

btw - I decided to wait on sending you the RH 7.3 CDs. RH 8.0 just came out so I'm going to send that to you instead, cool? I left them downloading at work - so I'll burn them Monday and send them sometime next week.

--deus
 
Great link deus. Lots of information, everything I wanted to know and more :D Thanks alot :grinthumb

Even better on the CD's :D Thank you! Sweet...

Years of filesystem debugging and redesign and the use of some extremely clever algorithms for writing data to disk have largely eliminated filesystem corruption caused by applications or the Linux kernel itself, but eliminating data corruption and loss due to power outages and other system mishaps is still the system programmer's equivalent of the search for the holy grail. When a Linux system crashes or is simply turned off without going through the standard shutdown procedure, the clean bit in filesystem headers is not set. The next time the system boots, the mount process detects filesystems that are are not marked as being clean, and manually verifies their consistency using the Linux/Unix 'fsck' (filesystem check) utility.
Click to expand...

:eek: Sounds very nice.
 
Originally posted by Vehementi
:eek: Sounds very nice.
Click to expand...
Only if you're using ext3. Its journaling, which by default flushes the journal every 5 seconds (if I remember correctly), helps a lot. If you're using plain ext2, fsck can take a few minutes if the partition is, say, 10GB.
 

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