[PLUG] when not to use a journaling FS

[Kyle Hayes]

On Saturday 10 January 2004 16:16, Carla Schroder wrote:
> Once upon a time I read something that said "do not use a journaling FS for
> this..", and I do not remember what it was. Some program or process, I
> believe, that does not work under anything but ext2. Does this ring any
> bells for anyone? I've been poring over notes and googling my head. learned
> a lot of cool stuff, anyway...
>
> It had nothing to do with performance, it was something that does not work
> at all.

A while ago LILO didn't like most of the journaling filesystems much 
(particularly Reiser).  But, that was solved along with the cylinder 1024 
problem etc.  I assume that Grub had this solved about the same time or 
earlier.

Generally, the only reason I can see for a separate boot partition and use of 
ext2 (not specifically non-journalling, but _just_ ext2) is that the various 
rescue disks/systems _all_ could handle ext2, but were indifferent or had 
varying support for the major journaling filesystems.  Since these rescue 
systems often don't support the particularly journalling system you want to 
use (you being the general you), it is wise to have /boot on a separate 
partition since you might just be able to get to your kernel then.

The same argument goes for having /boot be outside of LVM as Cooper pointed 
out.

That's the only set of reasons I can think of.  The lack of support in rescue 
disks is still an issue if you use JFS or XFS often.  Reiser seems to be 
better supported, but ext3 might be the best supported (since you can mount 
it as ext2 in a pinch).

Best,
Kyle