Fedora 11 leaps into filesystem unknown It seems like Fedora 10 came along just yesterday, but already Fedora 11 is here. If the quick turnaround time smacks of the sort "upgraditis" that proprietary operating systems push on users, fear not. Fedora isn't trying to reinvent the wheel every six months. Instead, the move from Fedora 10 to 11 promises to carry on with …
God quit with the scaremongering FUD. A workaround patch was applied in the 2.6.30 test kernels 3 months ago, and I'm almost certain the patch was backported in the Fedora 11 kernel.
Did you HAVE to bring up a 3 month old bug just to scare people? Is that how you increase your ad hits these days?
The Ext4 issue has been solved in Linux 2.6.30 (which may be released as soon as of today), by adding an implicit fsync after renames/truncates. The patches have also been added to the 2.6.29 kernel used by fedora (according to http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f11/en-US/sect-Release_Notes-File_Systems.html)
I tried ext4 under Ubuntu 9.04 with an encrypted /home and unencrypted /
The boot times were very good, as promised, but I began to suspect this might have been something the ext4 developers had to have to retain any part of their sanity....
After 2 weeks of frequent rebooting each day due to the system becoming firmly wedged I reinstalled using ext3, but otherwise the same setup. Since then I have had no problems at all. The work-loads were typical for software development - lots of edit/compile/link cycles - and the hangs seemed to be related to file-system usage, certainly not system/CPU load.. with monotonous regularity something as trivial as a 'find' would reduce the laptop to brick status (frozen desktop, unable to switch to a VT, little/no response to pings etc etc - even after an hour plus on the times I let it run..)
I didn't have time to try an unencrypted /home with ext4 as this was a machine I was using for work, but the lack of problems with ext3 + encryption might indicate it wasn't solely an encryption issue.
I'm not blaming ext4 per se, but the combination of ext4 meets the real world resulted in an effectively unusable system - at least on that combination of hardware/software.
YMMV but my personal opinion would be to avoid it like the plague for now - unfortunately - unless you have trivial work-loads and/or don't mind rebooting. Shame.
Why not use ZFS? Incompatible license... To work around this, its available in userspace via fuse, but that takes a (not so big) performance hit. ext4 might turn out to be a very welcomed filesystem improvement. Im very happy with fedora 10, and was going to skip fedora 11, but after reading this, am thinking it might be worth a shot.
Because ZFS is under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and thus can't be included in the Linux kernel. The only ZFS implementation of Linux AFAIK is a user-space FUSE driver.
It'd be possible to write a GPL'ed implementation of ZFS but I think the kernel guys are going their own way with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTRFS
The ZFS source was released under the CDDL license. The Linux kernel is under the GPLv2. The two are incompatible, period.
The only way ZFS will ever run on Linux is if it is relicensed (unlikely) or in userland as a FUSE filesystem (development underway). However this will limit its functionality.
The performance is great (I noticed a hell of an increase in speed from Ubuntu 8 to 9 anyway, but I have traced at least some of that back to ext4 by installing on ext3 on the same box). I've not had any problems with stability so far, but I've only been using it for a couple of weeks so I guess I'll find out :)
'Course, the nice thing about Linux* is if you want Fedora 11 but you don't want to follow them 'into the unknown' with ext4, you don't have to. You can have all the other new stuff but still stick with the ext3 (or ext2 if you're *really* not keen on change)
Sounds like Fedora 11's pretty nice actually, I'll have to have a play with it.
*one of the many nice things
Yeah, I said server. As the app points out, the issues occur in software that's not using the proper calls. I'm not running any of that software, and my server boots so fast it's scary. Also using it on a workstation and my laptop. Not had any problems at all, only benefits.
I think the point they are trying to make is that in Ubuntu you have to specify if you want to install with the ext4 filesystem, if you don't specify it will install with ext3 instead whereas by the sounds of things Fedora will install with the ext4 filesystem unless you specify otherwise.
I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 here with / formatted to ext4 and /home on a separate partition formatted to ext3. Not had any major issues, okay the card reader doesn't work after resuming from suspend but I'd say that is more down to the hardware rather than the distro and I can live with it anyway (hardly use SD cards).
It looks like KDE has a nice clean interface in Fedora, I did have a play with Xubuntu 8.10 but couldn't get on with it, I guess I was too used to Gnome although I think I may download the Fedora ISO and give KDE a try in VirtualBox to see what I'm missing.
Oh and in reply to "An OS that's fun to use?", yes it is fun to use. It's a breath of fresh air not having to put up with installing Windows Updates and then being nagged to death about rebooting (one of the things that really annoys me about Windows Server 2003), yes I know it's been tweaked in Vista so you can set it to go to sleep for 4 hours. I think between Linux and Windows I much prefer using Linux (and yes I do have a mix of Windows machines too).
Rob
Actually, not. One filesystem I know that uses delayed allocation is XFS (much older than ext4 and ZFS) as can testify anyone who was running on SGI machines that happened to lose power while not protected by UPSes… I'm sure other big-iron filesystems did delayed allocation too.
I've had it installed on my AA1 for about six hours now and it seems much faster, with less tuning, than fed10, however rather worryingly the wireless seems to crap out fairly regularly and requires a reboot to get it going again. (That is, I've not worked out how to make it work once crapped out without a reboot yet.)
Having said that, I'm probably going to use the madwifi drivers, becuase apparantly they make the LEDs work... Quite annoying nontheless.
I've run all the alpha, beta and preview versions as well the final of Fedora 11 and there's only two snags that are very noticeable for me they didn't fix by the final release, neither of which is mentioned in the article, ho hum.
First up is an ext4 issue - no, not the one that was fixed and wrongly accused of having by the article. It's the one that Ubuntu 9.04 sorted out and F11 didn't, namely that grub cannot handle ext4 /boot partitions (or / being ext4 if there's no separate /boot). Yes, if you want your system disk to be ext4 in Fedora, you *have* to create a separate /boot partition *and* that partition can't be ext4 - arrgh! There is a fix for this brewing, but it came too late for F11 :-(
Secondly is the old chestnut of chasing the X server release version beyond what the proprietary 3D drivers support, in particular ATI's fglrx driver (for which, neither radeon nor radonhd are acceptable open source alternatives yet, though the latter may eventually be decent enough).
I always wait until my favourite third-party repository (now called rpmfusion) packages the fglrx goodies up into RPMs and makes them available for download. As I write this, not a sign of the fglrx RPMs in any of the F11 rpmfusion repo trees, so that means no usuable 3D acceleration yet again (same happened with F9 [4.5 months!!] and F10 [1.5 months]) and I'll twiddle my thumbs until the drivers turn up and I can switch to F11. Luckily, ATI have a monthly release schedule for their Linux drivers, so it might only be a few weeks until 3D actually works in F11 at decent speeds.
If you're feeling really adventurous when you're installing Fedora 11 you can use btrfs (pronounced butter-eff-ess). You need to use the "icantbelieveitsnotbtr" when you boot the installation DVD.
People are going to be leaping up and down, again, asking why btrfs when you can have zfs. It's true that a lot of what zfs offers is also in btrfs, but btrfs is a step beyond zfs and is set to be the next generation file system for Linux.
I'm not familiar with a lot of linux operations, maybe slow boot times happen frequently with linux os' and that is what makes ubuntu's boot time remarkable but Windows 7 boots in on this machine ( Coreduo 6300 - 1.86ghz and 2gb ram) in 13 seconds. And by boots I do mean firefox is open and I am browsing in 13 seconds.
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