Effect of filesystem choice onto boot time

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Wed, 26 Apr 2006, Erich Schubert wrote:
> A recent real-world benchmark suggested that XFS is the top choice for

Well, just make sure / is not XFS.

1. It is not fsck-friendly, you need early userspace or specially deployed
   boot machinery (like a service partition) to xfs_repair it
2. It does not journal or order data, and just about *nothing* fsync()s
   stuff in /
3. / is almost always rw, i.e. you *really* want a sturdy filesystem there,
   and XFS is engineered for speed at the cost of reliability, not the other
   way around.
4. Someone might have this strange idea they can corrupt the filesystem
   installing a boot loader inside it and things should still work... and
   XFS won't let you get away with that like ext2/ext3 does.

> filesystem performance; reiserfs didn't do very well in that study,
> nor did ext3.
> http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/388

That article is quite clueless in parts, and its choice of a workload is...
strange at best. See http://lwn.net/Articles/181343/ for some responses to
it.

> The interesting number was the mount time though:
> ReiserFS took 5 to 15 times longer to mount the FS (2.3 secs) when
> compared to other FS (Ext3 = 0.2, JFS = 0.2, XFS = 0.5), and also 2
> times longer to umount the FS (0.4 sec)

Yes, reiser is very slow to u?mount...  If that's a deciding factor for you,
switch to ext3.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh