Installing JXFS [SOLVED]

Hi!

Since there is no forum for JXFS but it is very similar to SFS I thought I'd post here...

I'm about to install JXFS on a large partition of mine to be able to handle large files but then it struck me that I don't know any details and I couldn't find any docs for JXFS in OS4.1.

So, what block size should I use?

Is the correct DOS type JXF\04? (Assuming it is since that is the only thing listed in Media Toolbox.)

Any other details I should now, like recommended buffers for example?

@Deniil

Block Size = 512 (I think it has to be 512 for it to work).

For buffer, I have set to 1024 (not sure if something better than that).

@my_pc_is_amiga

Ok, I have quick formated (with the WB menu option), but I notice that the .recycled directory is visible in a normal directory listing!

How do I hide it like in SFS??

@Deniil

I also want to hide the damn .recycled dirs ;)

@Deniil&Kicko

iirc it was said that this will e a feature of a future revision of JXFS, not sure where i read or heard it, maybe on IRC

@Raziel

So we have to live with a visible .recycled dir??

That will screw up backups and find operations! :( How very unpractical.

@Deniil
Why not just use SFS2? It has a longer development history, and so should be more reliable/etc. I use it on a large parition without problems.

@ChrisH
Quote:
Because it is very slow and does not take advantage of the new dos.library features which JXFS does use. The only reason for keeping SFS around now is to boot Workbench and for backwards compatibility with some old broken software.

@ssolie

Quote:

Yes together with the fact that you can use PartitionWizard on it and share data with other systems too...

@ssolie & abalaban

Well, When I got my first SAM setup and got all the drives partitioned etc I wanted badly to use JXFS. I can't recall what problems I seemed to have (even though it was probably only 8 months ago) but it was enough for me to change ALL my partitions to SFS2.

I don't have a recycle dir at all, I believe if it's deleted it's gone and perhaps it makes some operations in SFS2 more reliable? although for the life of me I don't know why at times (seems after you've used a partition without reformatting it for a time) it can take quite some time for a deletion to complete...

But in general speed? hells teeth... copying between my SATA partitions is Lightning fast... I would say to select a file in DirOpus and to copy to another partition, probably another actual HD in my case as well... it moves a consistant 100 megs just shy of a second...

Before like on my classic if I sent a 300 meg file across I could go out and make a coffee and come back and it'll still be copying... now I move files of 500megs to 1g usually and I don't have time to stand up let alone go to the kitchen... LOL

And I don't get ANY errors with the file system... my only complaint is the delete times of partitions that have been used for too long... it used to be ALOT worse with a recycle dir in place... sometimes I'd have to go into the directory and manually delete the files stored inside to speed up operations... I thought removing the actual recycle dir would remove this problem... I thought it had worked but really it just delayed it...

SFS2 must suffer from a form of defragmentation?

So anyway, like the man said, what are the critical settings for JXFS? (outside the obvious like DOS type, blocksize and buffers) I feel like going back to it but I don't know, I can't remember what made me change... I'm thinking, perhaps the recent fixes addressed some of these issues?

Oops, the obvious is what he wants to hear too btw, heh, sorry... I'm at work so can't look at it... ah, the joys of Office work and being a boss

@ssolie Quote:
Got any proof of that? My understanding is that it is nearly as fast as JXFS, and of course much faster than FFS. Perhaps there is some specialised situations where it performs badly, but it seems great in general usage here.

And even if it does perform a bit worse than JXFS, I prefer stability & reliability over raw speed, since I highly value my data. I think JXFS still has a little way to go yet, or I might be using it myself.

Quote:
And do these new features do anything of real importance for JXFS? I am curious. Anyway, I am sure that SFS could be updated to use them if they are really that great.

@ChrisH

JXFS is several times faster than SFS and about ten times faster than FFS2 in Write operations (probably less than ten times faster for Reads). It is a journaling filesystem, so it is self-repairing.

JXFS has been in beta test and released to the public now for several years and is as stable as a rock.

JXFS is likely to become the new standard for AOS once someone gets the time to add boot support for it to SLB.

@tonyw

Booting would be great to have! Would be nice to have defrag as part of the toolset...most things are ghosted for JXFS in PartitionWizard.

@tonyw

That's it! I'm going home tonight and changing my partitions... but if something goes wrong... I'm going to come looking for you

@tonyw
I am sceptical that JXFS is "several times faster" than SFS. I could imagine 10%, perhaps even 50% in some specialised situations, but 200% or more faster seems ... unlikely (from my uneducated point of view).

Quote:
Filing systems (especially journalled ones) are incredibly complex pieces of software. It is very common for corruption problems (in some unusual situations) to not be discovered for some time. Beta-testing within a small group is insufficient to find the majority of those kinds of bugs. IMHO only testing within a large group of users over a long time will get you anywhere near close to finding most of those kinds of bugs.

As I am storing many GB of data, I do not wish to risk corruption (especially subtle corruption that monthly backups won't help with).

Because of all the above, I did not touched SFS with a barge pole for a long time, and instead stuck to the commercial PFS aka AFS (on OS3.x). It was only relatively recently (I guess a couple of years ago) that I decided to risk switching to SFS, because the number & severity of bug fixes had decreased to what I felt was a reasonable level.

Therefore I hope you will not chastise me too heavily for not trusting JXFS yet (which I do not believe has been public "for several years"). Especially when it does annoying things like not hiding the recycle directory, and when it breaks AmigaOS (1.x to 3.x) standards by not defaulting to RWED (at worst that should be an option, at best it should not have happened at all).

@ChrisH
Quote:
I suppose you didn't know the same person who did SFS and SFS2 also invented JXFS to work around all the problems with SFS et al.

@all

Well, I'm using JXFS on my largest partition now and after copying everything back I noticed an error in my single most important directory: My programming work directory containing all of my latest work!

As soon as I touch this directory I get this error requester:
JXfileSystem

DH5
has a blockid error in block 27361
Expected was blockid 0x41545452
but the block says it is blockid 0xFC62F92A


The directory looks only halv full but almost all files was copied according to the backup log. Also, I could delete all visible files but the directory is still not empty (only looks so) and I get an error 81 from any DOS tool trying to delete it.

HELP!?!

I have sometimes seen similar errors with SFS but it could fix itself and I would never see the error again. This one is persistant.

@Deniil

Use SFSFormat with JXFS partitions and you can use the NORECYCLED option.

@Deniil

Have you rebooted (hard reset) your machine ? Maybe your case is different but I've noticed sometimes some buggy app corrupts memory it might give false errors from file system (I guess cache is corrupted). If I don't try to delete or save anything but reboot my machine immediately the partition will be fine.

@colinw

If using NORECYCLED i think it doesnt use .recycled dir at all.
Deniil like me i think just want the .recycled dir to be hidden just
like SFS did. Or am i wrong ?