[SLUG] LPI 1.102.1 design hard disc layout

[Jonathan Worthington]

"Stephen O'Neill" <soneill84 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> john at johnallsopp.co.uk wrote:
>
>>I'd expected to see here something about the different file systems
>>themselves, FAT, NTFS, etc but there's no mention either in the spec
>>or in the LPI cram book.
>>
> With emphasis on EXT2/3, ReiserFS, XFS...
>
> I guess from a sys admin's piont of view they're all the same barring some 
> performance differences in different circumstances - the setup is still 
> the same as the implementation is worried about at a lower level.
I think one of the main differences between EXT2 and EXT3 is that EXT3 is a 
journalling file system (well, it journals the meta-data anyway).  So this 
means that if you have a crash and reboot and need to do a disk 
check/recovery, this can happen a lot faster on EXT3 as there's a 
journal/log saying what was being looked at when the failure happened.  So I 
guess that matters to a sysadmin somewhat.  The grotty implementation 
details are interesting, no doubt, but I guess not something the everyday 
sysadmin need care about.

When we looked at file systems at uni our case studies were on (V)FAT(32), 
NTFS, FFS and LFS, which kinda misses the commonly used Linux ones.

Jonathan