I lended a USB hdd, booted up to a fallback installation on a separate ext2 partition and tried to copy over everything to the USB hdd. It was quite tricky to copy over as much as I could and remembering the point where it started to crash when reading it. Luckily, I salvaged my whole /home. /var, /bin, /usr/share and a lot of other trees weren’t that lucky.

Formatted to XFS, copied everything I got back to the HDD and copied a Gentoo stage 3 tarball over it. A stage 3 tarball contains a minimal installation to which can be chrooted and then booted and from which the rest of the system can be build: the usual method to install Gentoo. I didn’t lost my world nor /etc/make.conf file. A small script later I got portage re-emerging every package I had installed on the system. Still 200 to go at the moment, but at least I’m now in a partially functioning gnome desktop, which is a lot more usable than TWM (ugly default WM of Xorg).

XFS performs quite well. It’s latency under load is a lot smaller than Reiser4′s. (It’s a pity I haven’t yet come to try the new patches in mm to help Reiser4 a bit with that problem. And also becasuse Reiser4 seems so close to inclusion, reading Andrew’s merge plans). In contrast, XFS sucks at handling a lot of small files compared to Reiser4. This is all just a feeling though. I haven’t tested anything. The most important characteristic of a FS, though, is only apparent after long use: the influence of fragmentation. Having looked around a bit, btrfs seems interesting.

On a sidenote on latency: my mom runs Ubuntu with EXT3 and even though EXT3 sucks in practically every single performance benchmark it has seem to got a superb responsiveness. Ah, 150 packages to go.

Recently most linux file systems are atomic. An operation is either performed fully or not at all.

QNTFS even goes further down. Quantumic operations. Something is done, or not done, or done and not done at the same time, depending on the reader, everytime.