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CentOS and JFS

I like JFS: better performance than ext3 and more reliable than reiserfs. However installation under CentOS is awkward, at best. Here’s one of the better install guides I found. Quoted from https://www.norlin.se/blog/2006/12/28/centos-and-jfs/

JFS (Journaled File System) is a file system from IBM. I have always really liked this file system since I first came across it, working with AIX, but I have never used it in a Linux environment until now. When you read comparisons of different file systems it seems JFS always comes out in a top position. For Linux it is sometimes beaten by XFS, but I think that is due to the fact that XFS is more widely used on Linux.

For some reason RedHat seems to have taken out support for JFS in RHES, but it is available for CentOS using the kernel in the CentosPlus repository. The process to upgrade an existing Centos installation to support JFS is simply to update the kernel with the kernel in centosplus and install jfsutils:

yum –enablerepo=centosplus install kernel-smp
yum –enablerepo=centosplus install kernel-smp-devel
yum install jfsutils

Then you probably need to change the “default” row in grub.conf and reboot to start using the new kernel with JFS support.

To create a JFS file system on a new partition use fdisk and mkfs -t jfs.

I think you need to stick to ext3 for the root and boot file systems though and there is no path (at least that I know of) for migrating an existing ext3 file system to JFS “in place”.

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  1. HJ
    May 24th, 2010 at 06:58 | #1

    one thing that i want to ask is what if i want to install JFS on a new created filesystem on which i am installing a new CentOS. is there any way i can create JFS partition directly without first installing ext3 and then switching it to jfs.

    Thanks
    HJ

    • peterk
      July 1st, 2010 at 16:50 | #2

      As far as I know, you can’t convert a partition from ext2/3 to JFS – you would lose your data. I generally reserve space, allocating just enough for the boot and root partitions. The others I create after first boot.

  2. Random CIO
    September 16th, 2010 at 09:50 | #3

    Hey, man, wanted to let you know that you might want to check your server for being owned; this morning I visited this page and it popped up a Windows fakealert from a ‘www2.clear-soft78.co.cc’ site. The page info for the fakealert had this page as the referrer; so you might want to check. Since it looks like you’re using WordPress, google for ‘wordpress fakealert server ‘ and see what turns up.

    • peterk
      October 15th, 2010 at 15:16 | #4

      I know Bluehost has been having problems owning up to this problem.
      Hopefully, a) they’ve finally fixed their end or, b) the latest WordPress update resolves this.
      Thanks for pointing out.
      Cheers,
      Peter

  3. Michael Will
    August 4th, 2011 at 17:30 | #5

    Why not XFS?

    • peterk
      January 31st, 2012 at 15:59 | #6

      In fact XFS is an excellent choice. At the time I wrote that post, I was using JFS on Ubuntu desktops and simply wanted the same on CentOS.
      However, over the last couple of years building a data warehouse on RHEL/CentOS, XFS has proven much easier to work with as RH supports
      XFS out of the box.

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