JFS File-System Seeing Minor Stability Improvements With Linux 6.7

[cjcox]

In my own testing, I just found JFS to be highly confusable (breakable). This weird sort of evolution of the version out of OS/2, well, it in many ways stood alone. Never offering something compelling enough to perhaps get the work done to make it reliable. It's not alone as a "cool filesystem" that never got enough traction though.

[Mark Rose]

IMHO, old reiserfs was more stable and better maintained. I'm a bit shocked by this JFS revelation. Somewhat confused. I'm certainly not advocating for the use of reiserfs, but I'd recommend it over JFS. Who ever used JFS? I mean, really. (just curious)

I did. It was great on low end systems, like the 486s and early Pentiums I learned on in the early 2000s. The reduction in CPU usage was noticable.

[Mark Rose]

If I recall correctly that is JFS2. So incompatible.

AIX had JFS and JFS2. OS/2 and Linux only have JFS2 but it's called JFS.

[stormcrow]

IMHO, old reiserfs was more stable and better maintained. I'm a bit shocked by this JFS revelation. Somewhat confused. I'm certainly not advocating for the use of reiserfs, but I'd recommend it over JFS. Who ever used JFS? I mean, really. (just curious)

I used it for a while in the naughts on a couple of secondary drives that held mixed types of data. At the time, XFS had a few issues that made it less suitable for mixed file types compared to JFS, especially on a home PC. In the early days XFS was designed for (very) large sequential files, namely video media since it came from SGI. SGI systems were heavily used in CG FX production in the day. It could also potentially lose data as it was designed for high end systems that never lost electrical power, and it had performance issues with directories with large numbers of files or lots of little files. It had fewer protections for data on less well behaved hardware. JFS was one of those things that tended to "just work" in a time when Linux... often didn't "just work". ext2 could potentially lose data in various scenarios especially in the frequent lock ups requiring hard resets that plagued desktop Linux at the time, ext3 was unbearably slow and clunky, and ext4 wasn't quite a thing yet as it was still in heavy development.

a couple array index out-of-bounds fixes for a 30 year old filesystem seems like the implementation must have been absolute trash.

It's the kind of problems i expect to see with bcachefs in the 6.8 development window.

While JFS itself is ancient, the Linux version was first introduced in the 2.4 series around 2002. It's barely 20. It's just not that heavily used any more so it doesn't get (and probably never did get) the eyes ext4, xfs, zfs, etc receive. Hell, X11R6 has been considered legacy-stable for 30+ years and there's still similar bugs being dug out of its code base, yet it's literally had thousands of eyes and automatic analysis engines picking over its code since the 80s.

[Rallos Zek]

IMHO, old reiserfs was more stable and better maintained. I'm a bit shocked by this JFS revelation. Somewhat confused. I'm certainly not advocating for the use of reiserfs, but I'd recommend it over JFS. Who ever used JFS? I mean, really. (just curious)

Nope ReiserFS is the only Linux filesystem to eat my data, as ext2 and ext3 were just fine on the same hardware and HDD. Back in the day SuSE had it as its default FS and made news because SuSE dropped it for EXT3 because Reiser was so bad. It also was notorious for slowing down the longer you used it, I remember old forum posts about boot times being extended by many minutes on a long lived ReiserFS partitions as it did for me as well.

[Estranged1906]

AIX and ArcaOS still use JFS, so it's not dead yet!

[cjcox]

AIX and ArcaOS still use JFS, so it's not dead yet!

It... is.... not.... the same. Well speaking of AIX anyhow. My point is ... I don't know of anyone (today) actively using the (unique) JFS implementation that is in Linux. But was looking for responses to the contrary.