[Discuss] Reading Linux book

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On 03/26/2014 03:14 PM, aldo albanese wrote:
> On the same topic, is this the partition layout that you would suggest on a new setup?
> Partition Recommended Size
> / Minimum 1 GB.

Isn't this where you will be installing all software? I suggest ~6GB or 
more these days.

> XFS This is a 64-bit, high-performance journaling
>     filesystem that provides fast recovery and can
>      handle large files efficiently.

I have been using XFS on my last several notebooks, running on top of an 
encrypted partition. A big part of my motivation was reports that it's 
deletes are inherently more secure, that the next allocation will 
recycle the previous free quickly. I am not certain this is true, but I 
liked the sound of it.

The flip side is that if you *do* want to undelete a file mistakenly 
deleted, this would be a bad choice.

> ext4 The newest default filesystem for Linux distribu-
>        tions. It is backwards-compatible with the ext2 and
>       ext3 filesystems. Among ext4?s improvements over
>          ext3 are journaling, support of volumes of up to
>         one exbibyte (EiB) and files up to 16 tebibytes
>          (TiB) in size.

I have seen others talking about ext4 being terribly unreliable. I 
didn't know that. If these are reproducible problems, it seems someone 
should put in a good bug report. Linus must think it works if he lets it 
in the kernel.

I have seen mention of btfs in this thread. When I first heard about it 
I was very excited but concluded (was told) it was not ready for 
primetime. Mostly the userspace tools were behind. Certainly things have 
gotten better, but I would still warn you off: the whole reason would be 
for the powerful features, largely the ability to snapshot and deal with 
different versions of your file system. Very cool! Very powerful! 
Dangerous territory.

One of the advantages to reality is there is only one of it, and it is 
worth our while to concentrate on it. When something like btfs allows 
you to have many different versions...oh, the management of all that 
seems very scary. Yes, if you have good reason to want those features, 
will be disciplined, and aren't going to get lost in a mire of versions, 
okay, that might be worth it.

But did you know that regular users can play with these fancy btfs 
features, too? A lot of power, don't get lost in it. Only go with btfs 
if you (a) expect to use the special features and (b) plan to not get 
burned by them.

I might be wrong, I admit I have never used btfs.

-kb