On Fri, 09 Dec 2011 23:26:47 +0100 clemens fischer <ino-news@spotteswoode.dnsalias.org> wrote:
Leonid Isaev wrote:
I think it's a better idea to have either /var/lib or entire /var on reiserfs.
/ ext4 30Gb /var ext4 10Gb /boot ext4 100Mb /var/lib reiserfs 500Mb /home ext4 85Gb /tmp ext2 2Gb
Interesting! Why do you think that? Me, I used my ears to determine the best filesystem for my workloads on the PC. Ext4 is the one with least head movement: the disks stay silent for long periods of time, then they have hectic fits and go quiet again.
In my experience reiserfs made a HUGE difference in pacman <3.5 performance compared to ext4, because /var/lib had lots of small files. Then pacman DB became compressed and this gain became minimal but still noticeable. I guess this is due to /var/lib/pacman/local/. Ext4 is optimal for intermediate-sized files, like the ones you typically find in /home.
Compare this with freebsd's UFS2+soft-updates, XFS and JFS. I didn't dare to use ZFS on freebsd and I think I never tried reiserfs, fearing it isn't on active development currently.
Reiser 3.6 is considered feature-complete I think, so only bugfixes are released. It was the default on SuSE until SLES 10 and is still maintained. There are myths of it being unstable. This is because on older kernels you had to write barriers manually to prevent data corruption; since 3.1 it is the default. I heard a lot of good things about JFS, but my personal experience was absolutely terrible (frequent FS corruptions after unclean shutdowns). Even BTRFS was better. XFS is good for large files, so if you have a dedicated partition for movies -- this is your best bet.
Oh, one other thing: my swap and home partitions are LUKS encrypted. The swap uses etc/crypttab with a random key, the key for home is on an USB dongle, so I can physically lock out people taking possession of the PC by keeping that dongle safely stashed away some place.
Cool :) I used LUKS but then figured it's not worth it. Because only several important file really need encryption, I ended up with plain gpg.
clemens
-- Leonid Isaev GnuPG key ID: 164B5A6D Key fingerprint: C0DF 20D0 C075 C3F1 E1BE 775A A7AE F6CB 164B 5A6D