Installing JXFS [SOLVED]

@Kicko

Quote:

That it is correct it won't use one at all... and I use norecycled on ALL my partitions...

They are all SFS2 except for the Boot directory...

Download directory is 150 gigs which shares a HD with DH0

and 4 x storage partitions of equal size on the 320 gig HD

I've never worried about undeleting...

If you need to undelete something you shouldn't be using it computer

NB: Just for clarity please remember undelete is completely different from Copying Data (or backup if you prefer, although I really don't back anything up I simply move it from my HD to DVDs otherwise it isn't that important) to another Media because you want to keep or Store it...

Another reason for me to remove the .recycle dir is because deleting files seemed to choke to a crawl at times as the drive continued in use and I would have to go into a recycle dir and delete everything inside it to make things fly again... I'm not too sure if you could change the max files or not but I thought it was a design flaw for sure... perhaps it had an inability to multitask properly... heh

But alas, even removing the .recycle dir didn't remove this problem... how long does it take to remove a file header?

@ssolie Quote:
No I didn't, and it's great to hear that his experience with SFS has been put to good use.

But that doesn't change any of what I said, and which I would still like an answer to... (hint: I'm looking for facts, not opinions.)

@Deniil
Quote:
Sadly it seems you have just proven my point about not trusting young filing systems.

@ChrisH

Been using JXFS on nearly all partitons for a while now.
The only problem I had was with Amicygnix which wouldn't load on a JXFS partion.
This was fixed with the Quick update.

I have moved large amounts of data with no issues.

Had no corruptions with Ibrowse when downloads crashed or something was writing to the cache.
This was often an issue on classic hardware using SFS and FFS.
No doubt that had much to do with slower, aging hardware.
I mention the above for the sole reason that if JXFS was likely to suffer problems at any point, this would probaby be it.

@ChrisH

Sorry to hear that Deniil had a problem with his copied volume. It would be the first I've heard of. I can sympathise with your reluctance to change over to a new system. It took me about a year to make the change.

Perhaps you have some hardware issues that only show up occasionally?

The "years" I spoke of refers to the time since JXFS was first released to betatesters (November 2006).

Since I converted my development volume from FFS to JXFS last year, I have had a couple of occasions when the system has crashed while writing to disk (due to program bugs). Whereas in the old FFS days, the system would seem to freeze on reboot while it performed its "validation", JXFS simply puts up a requester during the boot process saying something like "You can use the volume now" (or something, it's only there for a flash and I've never had time to read it).

The speed figures were not publicly released AFAIK. However, the Write speed of JXFS over FFS is obvious to anyone that makes the switch.

@tonyw
I daren't imagine that ANYONE uses FFS anymore! I haven't used FFS since AFS/PFS was commercially available in the (mid?) 1990s. Journalled filing systems like AFS/PFS, SFS & JXFS are lightyears ahead of FFS in speed terms (e.g. I recall that Quake would load 10x faster when using PFS). And of course having to wait for a multi-GB sized partition to be validated by FFS due to a crash would seem like going back to the stone-age!

BTW, is there a detailed version history of JXFS stores somewhere, which I could use to guage how stable it has become? SFS has a nice juicy one :)

@ChrisH

*I* am still using FFS and I don't plan to switch to JXFS yet. Two main things are preventing me to do so :
1) no proper (and trusty) tool(s) to recover/repair damaged JXFS partition,
2) not bootable.

I wasn't aware of the protection bit problem but that is certainly annoying.

FFS does the job for me, not speedy but it works, since I use it on my A590 (arround 1990) I never had any problem unrecoverable that was not due to me, for example I still have files on my current HD that are dated from this period.

EDIT: another advantage about using slow file system : you think more before launching a complete compilation because you know it will take time, so you tend to write better things

@abalaban Quote:
SFS already meets both of these criteria, as long as you use SFS\00 not SFS\02. Support for booting from SFS\00 is already built-in to OS4, and PartitionWizard (in Utilities) supports Salvage (and Optimise!).

Changing a partition to use SFS is very easy with Media Toolbox, but you will need to backup that partition first. BTW, I use a blocksize of 512, which I think is the correct/optimal value.

Quote:
JXFS defaults to RW-D, instead of RWED, for some reason (perhaps a misguided attempt at "security" in AmigaOS?). Most of the time it shouldn't cause a problem, because (1) most files are not executable, and (2) most programs set the protection bits when creating a new file. But it is possible you might find some newly created/unarchived programs won't run because they never had their protection bit set. Personally I'd rather not have to risk stop using a favourite program of mine, just because JXFS is incompatible with it.

@abalaban
Quote:
Beware of the limitations when using larger hard drives. FFS was never designed for what you are using it for which is why it is being replaced with JXFS. Make backups and don't rely on any recovery tools... ever.

Hi @ssolie

Beware of the limitations when using larger hard drives.
What is the max HD size allowed to avoid troubles? I thought greater than 120GB was not a good idea.

@Snuffy

iirc 2 GB max for Partitions and 4 GB max for HD?s

Could be wrong though, my memory is sometimes playing tricks on me

@TSK

I probably should have rebooted when I noticed the error, but I didn't and now I can't get rid of the damaged directory

What do you recommend? Reformat and try again..?

It's quite annoying the file system can't fix an error like this itself by terminating or correcting the damaged block and carry on in a clean state.

I have 37GB on this partition now and really don't want to reformat it again.

@ChrisH

I also didn't quite trust this new file system very much, and SFS/2 even less, but after being out in the public for a while and after the quickfix I thought it would be safe.

Does the author of JXFS have anything to add here..?

The FFS2 readme in SYS:Documentation says:
Quote:

@ChrisH

I think there still are OS 4.x people who run FFS, me included.
I had a lot of problems with getting OS 4.x to run in the
beginning (micro-A1 in 2004), so I haven't dared to change
anything since then. But maybe I should give SFS a try, at least.

regards
Kotler

@Kotler

I think its time to move on to newer, better, faster :)

I agree with ChrisH. JXFS is not "several times" faster than SFS2. Simply make a try in the same partition with different filesystems.

In my review of AmigaOS 4.1, JXFS was not really faster than SFS or SFS2 :
http://obligement.free.fr/articles/amigaos41.php (first table)

If somebody else could do some test on his hard drive, it could confirm this (or not).

@ChrisH

I'm still using FFS, but I need to switch. I've had two scary moments in the last few weeks (yes I have backups), but partition wizard (included with the OS) sorted things out after a bit of playing around.

I'm wanting to make the switch to JXFS or SFS, but have never had the confidence to move over. With the problems I've had in the last couple of weeks I think it's now time to switch.. .. but to which one!

Cheers,
Bean.

@ChrisH

I am another one of those few users of FFS. When I first received and installed OS4.1 on my A1XE, I set up my System partition to use SFS, being newer than FFS, and being bootable. I used, and am still using JXFS for my Work partition.

Fairly soon after my first installation, my SFS partition kept invalidating. It kept trying to write all new information to the exact same block. I reinstalled SFS, reformatted the partition, and reinstalled OS4.1. Again, everything tried to write to the same block, invalidating the System partition. I tried reinstalling a third time. It did the same stuff the third time. I then reformatted the partition as FFS. So, until JXFS becomes bootable, I'll be using FFS.

[Edit: My memory has gotten the better of me. As I remember, the invalidation of my SFS was due to faulty memory. I still use FFS "just in case" it wasn't just the RAM being at fault.]

My big question is, "When will SLB be updated to allow JXFS to boot?" (I know, "When its done!")

-The Phantom Interrogative

I've been using JXFS almost since I installed AmigaOS4.1 and haven't had any problems (if I can remember).

Quote:
We're all waiting that eagerly.

Ok, this is just getting worse...

Everytime my backup runs I get a million requesters from JXFS that a block-ID was incorrect. After clicking OK a few hundred times I noticed that the requester saying that the block (there are 4 or 5 damaged blocks and they all seem to carry directory information since they reoccur all the time) was ALWAYS expected to have ID 0x44415441 but it was something else. A new random value every time.

Do you know what 0x44415441 spells if you write it in text?? It spells "DATA".

This smells like a bug to me. A word from Joerg would be much appreciated before my disk crashes completely.

The question is, should I reformat and fill the disk differently, hoping to hide the bad blocks, which JXFS apparently can handle or fix, in some mp3s or movies where they won't hurt anyone..? Right now they are scattered all over my programming backup directories.

So, is SFS better at handling bad blocks, or does it simply not report broken files? I believe in the latter since I have noticed that my mp3s have degraded in quality over time. There are more and more files with hickups in them (and I think its not just my imagination;)) and that partition uses SFS.

May JXFS simply be better at reporting the problems..?

@Deniil

This is the sort of problem you'll probably end up when using a filesystem using a lot caching in order to improve performance on a non memory protected environment...