[mdlug] reiserfsck and badblocks

[Joseph C. Bender]

Raymond McLaughlin wrote:
> Aaron Kulkis wrote:
>> Really?  Didn't know that -- I was under the impressionn that
>> SuSE required an ext* filesystem for the root filesystem.
>>
>> I'll remember that, as I'm going to be upgrading my laptop
>> from 10.1 in the near future.
> 
> Oh, I just remembered one consideration. To maintain compatibility with
> the Irix implementation, Linux XFS always starts writing the file system
> in the first sector of the device it is written to. This makes it
> incompatible with installing GRUB (or LILO for that matter) into the
> first partition of the boot sector with an XFS boot partition. As long
> as you can install the boot loader elsewhere, MBR or another partition,
> then XFS can be used for boot/root filesystems.
 >
	I use XFS extensively on my laptops that I have Linux loaded on, just 
because it's been a really good fit for them.

	That being said, I always set up /boot as ext3.  Firstly,  because of 
the issues with installing Grub or LILO mentioned above.  Secondarily, 
if I get into a real jam, /boot is then Linux-universally mountable from 
a boot CD or Live CD.  I've gotten jammed up trying to recover a 
non-booting system when /boot is XFS and not always easily mountable. 
As the partition has almost no activity against it after the boot 
process is done, it's not a big deal to have this happen.  / and the 
other filesystems are then set up XFS.


-JCB