In recent history, journaling file systems were viewed as an oddity and thought of primarily in terms of research. But today, a journaling file system (ext3) is the default in Linux®. Discover the ideas behind journaling file systems, and learn how they provide better integrity in the face of a power failure or system crash. Learn about the various journaling file systems in use today, and peek into the next generation of journaling file systems.

Filesystem Types
* The most common filesystem types are:
ext2,ext3,ext4 The standard Linux filesystems

iso9660 The filesystem used on CD-ROMs

One might think that the ext3 filesystem, by virtue of being standard on almost all installed Linux systems for some years now, would be reasonably well tuned for performance. Recent events have shown, though, that some performance problems remain in ext3, especially in places where the fsync() system call is used.

On occasion, you will see the advice that the ext3 file system is not suitable for Solid State Disks (SSD’s) due to the extra writes caused by journaling — and so Linux users using SSD’s should use ext2 instead. However, is this folk wisdom actually true?

The Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) project allows you install new filesystems without touching your Linux kernel. The filesystems run as regular programs, allowing them to use shared libraries and perform tasks that would be difficult from inside the Linux kernel. FUSE filesystems look just like regular filesystems to other applications on the machine.

Most often, when someone talks about a filesystem or file system, they're referring to disk filesystems such as NTFS, FAT, ext2, ext3, ext4, ISO 9660 and many others but can also refer to network file systems such as CIFS and NFS. But, is there a perfect filesystem?

When it comes to file systems, Linux® is the Swiss Army knife of operating systems. Linux supports a large number of file systems, from journaling to clustering to cryptographic. Linux is a wonderful platform for using standard and more exotic file systems and also for developing file systems.

There might be the situation, that your root filesystem runs out of space, so it has to be expanded. With filesystems other than the root filesystem this could easily be done for instance with gparted. With the root filesystem this is not possible, as gparted could only expand filesystems that are not mounted, which is impossible with the root filesystem.

By now, everyone knows that if you want to make a file unrecoverable, you can't simply delete it - you have to use a tool like 'shred' or 'srm' to overwrite its contents. But a common question is whether this is effective on an ext3, ext4, or other journaled filesystems. This article discusses these filesystems, and whether secure deletion tools work on them.