Linux defiantly doesn’t have a lack of choice when it comes to file systems to choose form. I’ve use most of the them for my main file systems, currently I am running ext2 on /boot ext3 on /home and /, and using ext4 for my portage tree and distfiles on /usr/portage. In the past I have use reiserfs, reiser v4, jfx and xfs. They have all had their pros and cons, and I’ve have used them all on my /usr/portage. Interestingly enough, the best experience of them all is ext4. The others would become fragmented over time, since I am a bit anal about running the latest software I normally sync my tree almost daily. Most of the time every other day.so there are a lot of re-writes and small files scattered all throughout that partition. I have nothing but great performance using ext4. So much so, with the release of 2.6.28 I am thinking of moving my / partition to it.

This would give me /boot as ext2, /home as ext3 and everything else as ext4. I’ve read good things about it, it seems to handle large and small files alike with ease. I am actually pretty excited with the though of moving to it.

Hopefully my experiences will continue to be on the good side of things as I move to ext4!