RE: Grendel - Linux file system testing - long post

["Mark Knecht" <markknecht attbi com>]

Grendel,
   Great info. I will likely mount all 4 tomorrow and test them as ext2.
I'll then try ext3 on one of them, and depending on how that goes, move on
to reiser and XFS over the next day or two.

   Thanks for the very clear instructions. I'll let you know how it goes,
and I post the test results, graphs and all, so that people can see what
this all looks like from a latency point of view.

Cheers,
Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-install-list-admin redhat com
[mailto:redhat-install-list-admin redhat com]On Behalf Of Kalum /
Grendel
Sent: Tuesday, October 01, 2002 7:19 PM
To: Mark Knecht
Cc: Redhat-Install-List (E-mail)
Subject: Re: Grendel - Linux file system testing - long post


On Tue, 1 Oct 2002,  Mark Knecht commented thusly,

> 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.

No problem, anyway its better I think keeping it on this forum as anyone
can chip in with his/hers advice.

>    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.


So in summary your current system is mounted as
/dev/hda5 = windoze
/dev/hda6 = / (root)
/dev/hda7 = swap


I have stripped a few of the entries....of the fdisk command

>    Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hda4          2308      2434   1020127+  83  Linux
> /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.

Yes, as they are ext2 you can create the mount points in /mnt, and then
add the entries to /etc/fstab to point to the mount points you have
created. Or you can mount them manually.

here is a example from my /etc/fstab, my /dev/hda5 is a XFS partition.

/dev/hda5       /mnt/morespace  xfs

So now say you create a mount point  as /mnt/testpart1, and you wish to
mount /dev/hda4 then your fstab file should have the following line

/dev/hda4       /mnt/testpart1  ext2

as your /dev/hda4 is a ext2 filesystem you specify it as ext2.anyway you
probably know the above.

>    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.

Unfortuantely there are no "converting programs" to my knowledge, which
means that basically you have 1 option.

1. Copy the data to a spare partition preserving attributes etc, Make the
new partition, which would delete the data on the ext2 in that partition
, and copy back the data to it.


Example, you have just tested /dev/hda4 as ext2 and want to convert it to
reiserfs,

well copy the current files from /dev/hda4 (you can use the cp command or
the tarball method) to some location on another partition, say your /
partition.

Now unmount it
umount /dev/hda4

mow we create the reiserfs
Just run mkreiserfs /dev/hda4 which will delete the ext2 file system on
it...

now you have a blank reiserfs /dev/hda4, so we will remount it..(you will
have to change you relevant fstab entry from ext2 to reiserfs), or
manually mount it with the "-t reiserfs" option

now you can copy back the data which you copied to another partition, and
you are back with a reiserfs partition.


Its the same for XFS.

some usefule links
<http://www1.freeos.com/articles/3933/>

About reiserfs...

<http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/>
<http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/faq.html>

You can find patches for basically all the linus kernels and a few of the
ac kernels at the xfs site.


Best Wishes,
Grendel


--
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Prozilla: all your files are belong to us.





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