[conspire] The practice of making ext4 a default needs to die an excruciating and gruesome death

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Sat, 2012-08-11 at 15:58 -0700, Daniel Gimpelevich wrote: 
> On Sat, 2012-08-11 at 12:39 -0700, Adrien Lamothe wrote: 
> > Google to the rescue:
> > 
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems
> > 
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Linux_file_systems
> > 
> > The first url has a list of filesystems by year of creation, so just
> > scroll down a bit to check out those recently introduced.
> 
> I did some digging. Seems the "crash-only" model has been applied mostly
> to application development rather than file systems. Exactly one
> "crash-only" file system was ever developed for Linux, and it was later
> deprecated in favor of BTRFS by its author, Valerie Henson-Aurora. It
> seems the REAL gremlin at work in the woes I described may be write
> caching. Could "hdparm -W0 /dev/sda" really be the answer to everything?

Another possible suggestion in addition to turning off write caching is
the "sync" mount option. The *buntu desktop installer discs do not ask
for mount options and just set them to "relatime" but the alternate
installers default to "defaults" (without "relatime") and give you a
number of additional mount options.

The option of "noatime" there would be convenient for installing to
SSD's, but sadly the option to have ext4 with no journaling is not
there, so you have to either format manually or use tune2fs afterward.
Don't forget to turn off all swap!