[mdlug] reiserfsck and badblocks

[Joseph C. Bender]

Wojtak, Greg wrote:
> Just curious - why not ext2 instead of ext3?  Fewer moving parts, and
> /boot doesn't do a huge amount of transactions where journaling may
> be needed?
> 
	It's the default on many distros.  As for moving parts, well, ext3 has 
been around for quite some time now, it's not like it's unstable and 
liable to break at any time.  From the kernel's perspective, it's not a 
heck of a lot more complicated.

	Additionally, I've found that ext3 has lead to fewer issues when the 
box crashes or falls over.  I've had fairly bad /boot corruption on ext2 
because it hadn't written out to disk properly.  Under ext3, the 
journaling makes crashes less painful overall.

I do have crashes, mostly because I'm not a out-of-the-box sort of user, 
and there's a lot of experimentation and devel work happening on my 
hardware.  Even laptops.

	Generally, my reasoning is something along the lines of wanting write 
operations to /boot to be as atomic as possible.  The ext3 journal gets 
me that, as I don't have partial writes to disk with the journal 
brokering transactions to the main filesystem.  As you pointed out, 
/boot doesn't do that many transactions, so I don't see a major 
performance impact. When it *does* need to write, I need to make sure 
it's written properly.  The journal is cheap insurance against the whole 
thing getting corrupted and fsck screwing up fixing the underlying 
filesystem (and I've had that happen more than a few times).

	Worst case scenario, I can tell whatever I'm booting off of to ignore 
the journaling and fsck and mount that partition as ext2.


-JCB