Posted by: Administrator
on October 13, 2006 04:57 PM
First, as a poster said earlier, it's only a change in the default for new installations. Nobody is being deprived of R3.
That said, leaving R3 for another filesystem is guaranteed to require a re-format. But what about the next filesystem upgrade after that? How about ext3 to ext4? We already have the ext4 developers' word that it will be a clean, non-destructive upgrade, just as ext2-to-ext3 was. Will R5 require a re-format to upgrade from R4? We don't know yet. Given the re-format required for R3-to-R4, it would be unwise to expect a non-destructive upgrade from R4 to R5.
Now, for those "performance" figures...
Seriously, what program or user creates 16,000 empty files all at once? A program may create 5, 10, 20, or even 100 temporary files, but those are usually held in<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/tmp, mounted as a tmpfs so that it uses no actual disk access other than swapping. Even if they aren't, (1) filesystem caching will help the performance, but (2) are you really going to notice if The GIMP takes an extra half-second to launch?
Actually, odds are that launching The GIMP on an ext3-based SuSE system will be faster. For now, at least, ext3 on SuSE means it's a new system, with little to no filesystem fragmentation.
The big exception to this is unpacking large source tarballs, like the Linux kernel (25,225 files in my Slackware source tarball). Even then, is your kernel build so urgent that 15 seconds more to unpack is a matter of life or death? And how many times a day are you unpacking source tarballs, anyway? 5, 10, 20, 100?
(I'm ignoring the build process. It's CPU-bound, no matter the filesystem.)
Don't blindly quote benchmarks. Think instead about SuSE's target audience, and real-world usage.
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Posted by: Administrator on October 13, 2006 04:57 PMFirst, as a poster said earlier, it's only a change in the default for new installations. Nobody is being deprived of R3.
That said, leaving R3 for another filesystem is guaranteed to require a re-format. But what about the next filesystem upgrade after that? How about ext3 to ext4? We already have the ext4 developers' word that it will be a clean, non-destructive upgrade, just as ext2-to-ext3 was. Will R5 require a re-format to upgrade from R4? We don't know yet. Given the re-format required for R3-to-R4, it would be unwise to expect a non-destructive upgrade from R4 to R5.
Now, for those "performance" figures...
Seriously, what program or user creates 16,000 empty files all at once? A program may create 5, 10, 20, or even 100 temporary files, but those are usually held in<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/tmp, mounted as a tmpfs so that it uses no actual disk access other than swapping. Even if they aren't, (1) filesystem caching will help the performance, but (2) are you really going to notice if The GIMP takes an extra half-second to launch?
Actually, odds are that launching The GIMP on an ext3-based SuSE system will be faster. For now, at least, ext3 on SuSE means it's a new system, with little to no filesystem fragmentation.
The big exception to this is unpacking large source tarballs, like the Linux kernel (25,225 files in my Slackware source tarball). Even then, is your kernel build so urgent that 15 seconds more to unpack is a matter of life or death? And how many times a day are you unpacking source tarballs, anyway? 5, 10, 20, 100?
(I'm ignoring the build process. It's CPU-bound, no matter the filesystem.)
Don't blindly quote benchmarks. Think instead about SuSE's target audience, and real-world usage.
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