Thread: File system

Ubuntu, unlike many other distributions, gives a choice of filesystems to use during installation itself. We chose XFS as our major filesystem over the numerous other choices (and moreover, above the most common ext3 filesystem) because of its impressive speeds in creating a file, deleting a file, fast filesystem checks, faster reads from and writes to disk compared to many other available filesystems.
Later in this article I will explain why the /boot partition is ext3. Xfs is a 64-bit file system that uses extents to allocate blocks to files, leading to efficient use of space even as files grow in size.

More information on xfs can be found at the following resources:caches large amounts of data before writing to disk while maintaining transparency to the user. There is a problem with this feature though: if the system unexpectedly loses power, all that's in the cache does not get written to disk. Which means data loss. Therefore, ensuring that the system receives proper power is of prime importance.



Xfs IDesystems are checked and repaired if required during mount. To manually check and repair an xfs IDesystem, use xjs_check and xjsJepair (jsck.xjs does nothing at all).

Xfs is the oldest journaling IDe system available for the UNIX system. It was created by 8GI for its IRIX systems. Arguably, it is the highest-performance journaling IDesystem so far. Although each IDesystem available today has its own merits and demerits, given the disk usage patterns on desktops these days I would rate xfs as the best IDe system for desktops.

Also notice the mount options specified-the IDesystem is mounted with the 'noatime' option turned on (Figure 6). Whenever a IDe is accessed, the operating system records this information. By access I mean when the contents of a IDe are read or when a script is executed. This information is pretty irrelevant to a desktop user and storing this information every time a IDe is accessed is a major overhead. This can be avoided by using the 'noatime' option. This option will not affect anything related to the modified time.