[mythtv-users] ext4 mkfs largefile4 option

[Stephen Worthington]

On Thu, 07 Mar 2013 07:52:09 -0700, you wrote:

>On 03/07/2013 02:07 AM, Stephen Worthington wrote:
>>
>> The recommended filesystem for a recordings partition is JFS or XFS:
>>
>>    http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html
>>    (search for "Filesystems")
>>
>> I use JFS on my 3 Tbyte drives and am very happy with it.
>>    
>but has the documentation been updated to reflect the fact that ext4 is 
>available? I am currently using xfs, but the bench marks seem comparable:
>
>http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ext4_benchmarks&num=2

No, the documentation does not appear to have been updated to
recognise the existence of ext4.  But the major problem with ext
filesystems and MythTV is with the time taken to do file deletes of
large files.  I do not think that has changed in ext4 - the benchmarks
on that page you refer to shows that.  You can use MythTV's option for
slow deletes - then I think ext4 does work.  Without the slow deletes
option, I believe that an ext4 partition will become too busy during a
delete and recordings will be damaged.

But why risk using a filesystem that is not recommended for
recordings, when JFS works well and is recommended?  Just install the
jfsutils package and use JFS.  Or the equivalent for XFS.