Grendel - Linux file system testing - long post

["Mark Knecht" <mknecht controlnet com>]

Grendel,
   We can take this offline if it's going to use too much bandwidth
rh-install bandwidth or bore other people. I think others will find some of
this helpful, but it's up to them. (I know you and I will!) Thanks in
advance.

   Following on from the previous conversation, I set up a machine today
with a fairly complicated, but interesting, set of disk partitions for the
purpose of playing with some of these different file system options, ext2,
ext3, reiserfs and XFS. I will be using Benno's latencytest scripts, plus a
modified version that uses alsa and jack, as this is what we are
standardizing on in the Ardour Users group.

   Currently most of these are partitions not mounted. The results of the df
command is shown, as well as my current /etc/fstab file, and the p command
in fdisk:

[root RH73WO root]# df
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6              4032092   2536096   1291172  67% /
none                     63560         0     63560   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda5              2047968    112512   1935456   6% /mnt/share
[root RH73WO root]#

*****************
*****************
Contents of /etc/fstab

LABEL=/                 /              ext2    defaults        1 1
none                    /dev/pts       devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
none                    /proc          proc    defaults        0 0
none                    /dev/shm       tmpfs   defaults        0 0
/dev/hda7               swap           swap    defaults        0 0
/dev/cdrom              /mnt/cdrom     iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0                /mnt/floppy    auto    noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/hda5               /mnt/share     vfat    uid=505,gid=502,umask=2   0 2

*****************
*****************
Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 2434 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1             1        20    160618+   6  FAT16
/dev/hda2          1543      2307   6144862+  1c  Hidden Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda3   *        21      1542  12225465    5  Extended
/dev/hda4          2308      2434   1020127+  83  Linux
/dev/hda5            21       275   2048256    6  FAT16
/dev/hda6   *       276       785   4096543+  83  Linux
/dev/hda7           786       824    313236   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda8           825      1002   1429753+  83  Linux
/dev/hda9          1003      1257   2048256   83  Linux
/dev/hda10         1258      1542   2289231   83  Linux


   What I'd like to do is mount each of the new Linux partitions (hda4,
hda8, hda9 & hda10 - currently all ext2), check that they are all working,
and then convert each of them to a different file system for testing. This
keeps all the file systems on the same drive and HD controller.

   Can you give me some pointers on how to go about this? I assume I
probably just make some mount points and then create some entries in fstab
to mount them as ext2. Is this correct? I want to run latencytest on each
partition to make sure I look for any differences across the drive itself.

   Following that, how to I convert them to the new file systems? Are there
programs for 'formatting' them into reiserfs or XFS? How do I turn on
journaling to get ext2 to act as ext3.

Thanks in advance,
Mark