[mythtv-users] ext4 mkfs largefile4 option

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 7:42 AM, Stephen Worthington
<stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:
.....
> 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.

As an extent based file system (presuming using the new options,
and not using ext4 in ext3 compatibility modes) deletes are very
fast.  Using an appropriate allocsize value in the mount options
can reduce fragmentation issues when recording many concurrent
recordings.

> But why risk using a filesystem that is not recommended for
> recordings, when JFS works well and is recommended?

While I have used jfs in the past, and it works quite well,
ext4 is the new recommendation for most commercially
supported distros (which, in effect, means the best tested
file system), and it too seems to work quite well for
mythtv recordings.

jfs and xfs are both good choices of file systems.  Both
are being maintained, and have good characteristics.  But
the clear advantage over ext3 for MythTV is no longer
valid for ext4.

I think this is an example of documentation bit rot, and
in an ideal world most of the documentation on mythtv.org
would move to the wiki where it can be differently maintained.

Gary