[Sugar-devel] Unbootable machine

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 09:33:22PM -0400, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
>El Sun, 30-08-2009 a las 20:12 +0200, Jonas Smedegaard escribió:
>
>> Yes, the name of the tool is misleading: It works with other fs types 
>> too - its main purpose it partitioning, not fs formatting.  I 
>> succesfully booted USB sticks formatted as ext2 (as far as I recall - 
>> I last worked with it a year ago).
>
>On a side note, which filesystem should be chosen in order to minimize 
>wearing to USB sticks?
>
>I would assume that the any DOS filesystem will continouously rewrite 
>to the FAT blocks.  Maybe the best choice would be ext4 with the 
>journal disabled?

For read-only parts: some compressed filesystem (to minimize read wear), 
e.g. squashfs or the FUSE2-based fusecompress write-protected.

For read/write parts: some filesystem without journaling, best a log fs 
(i.e. "rotating" fs), e.g. nilfs2.

...but that is looking only at wear.  Taking reliability and performance 
into account too, I would use ext4 without journaling (possibly even for 
read-only stuff too, just write-protected, to ease administration and 
possibly also memory concumption and performance due to simpler and 
shared cache handling!).

A hint about ext4 disabling journaling: There is 2 ways of doing it - 
setting a flag in the ext4 metadata and setting a flag in the root dir 
metadata.  The first is the obvious one, but was introduced only in 
Linux 2.6.30 (or was it 2.6.29?).  The other method works also with 
earlier incarnations of ext4, but works only if you set it as the very 
first activity on the filesystem, as newly created objects inherit 
features from the dir they were created in.


  - Jonas

-- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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