SUSE Linux Enterprise 10
Filesystems Features Overview
SUSE® Linux Enterprise was the first enterprise Linux distribution to support journaling filesystems and logical volume managers back in 2000. Today, we have customers running XFS and ReiserFS with more than 8TiB in one filesystem, and the SUSE Linux Enterprise engineering team is using our 3 major Linux journaling filesystems for all their servers.
We are excited to add the OCFS2 cluster filesystem to the range of supported filesystems in SUSE Linux Enterprise.
For large-scale filesystems, for example for file serving (e.g., with with Samba, NFS, etc.), we recommend using XFS.
Features and limits of the various filesystems:
(In this table "+" means "available/supported"; "-" is "unsupported")
| Feature Group | Feature | Ext 3 | ReiserFS 3.6 | XFS | OCFS2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Journaling | Journaling: Data/Metadata | +/+ | -/+ | -/+ | -/+ |
| Journal-Replay Kernel/Userspace | +/+ | +/+ | +/- | +/+ | |
| Journal internal/external | +/+ | +/+ | +/+ | +/- | |
| Internal Structures | Inode-Allocation-Map | table | unified B*-tree | B+-tree | table |
| Dynamic Inode-Allocation-Map | - | + | + | + | |
| Extents | - | - | + | + | |
| Inode Inline Data | + (sym-links< 60chars) | + | + | + | |
| Sparse Files | + | + | + | + | |
| Tail Packing | - | + | - | - | |
| Defrag | + (unstable) | (not available) | + | - | |
| Resizing | Offline extend/shrink | +/+ | +/+ | -/- | +/- |
| Online extend/shrink | +/- | +/- | +/- | +/- | |
| ACLs, Quotas, ... | Extended Attributes/Posix-ACLs | +/+ | +/+ | +/+ | (planned) |
| Quotas | + | + | + | (planned) | |
| Dump/Restore | + | - | + | - | |
| Sizes/Limits | Blocksize(s): (range) default | (1,2,4 KiB) 4KiB |
(up to 64 KiB) 4KiB |
(up to 64 KiB) 4 KiB |
(up to 4 KiB) 4 KiB |
| max. FS-size | 16 TiB | 16 TiB | 8 EiB | 16 TiB (theoretically up to 4 PiB) | |
| max. File-size | 2 TiB | 1 EiB | 8 EiB | 1 EiB |
Remarks:
- The maximum file size above can be larger than the filesystem's actual size due to usage of sparse blocks. It should also be noted that unless a filesystem comes with large file support (LFS), the maximum file size on a 32-bit system is 2 GB (231 bytes). Currently all of our standard filesystems (including ext3 and ReiserFS) have LFS, which gives a maximum file size of 263 bytes in theory. The numbers given in the above tables assume that the filesystems are using 4 KiB block size. When using different block sizes, the results are different, but 4 KiB reflects the most common standard.
- In this document: 1024 Bytes = 1 KiB; 1024 KiB = 1 MiB; 1024 MiB = 1 GiB; 1024 GiB = 1 TiB; 1024 TiB = 1 PiB; 1024 PiB = 1 EiB (see also http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html )