[PLUG] when not to use a journaling FS

[Terry Griffin]

On Saturday 10 January 2004 4:16 pm, 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.

When I first started using journaling file systems on my laptop I found it
really hurt the battery life. Then I started mounting with the noatime option
and that seemed to take care of it.

I echo the other comments about /boot. It's so small and so infrequently
modified that there's not much to gain from journaling. Better to save
the overhead disk space on such a small partition and suffer the relatively
small fsck time after a crash.

If even the small post-crash fsck time on /boot in intollerable, one way to
avoid it is to mount /boot as read-only. Just remember to remount it as
read-write for those kernel updates.

Terry

P.S. Take care when doing a spell-check on a document with "fsck"
in it. Kmail's spell checker suggested a rather rude replacement.