Tune your filesystem

Taken from the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter, 17 October 2005:

ext2/3 are the main filesystems for a large amount of users but what a lot of people don’t know is that you can get almost Reiser4 speed out of it without any of the instability they’d associated with Reiser4. One of the great features of ext2/3 is the ability to tune it by adjusting various parameters.

Let’s take some precautions, first of all by finding out if some of those parameter are already enabled, by running

(replacing XX with your drive and partition your ext2/3 filesystem resides in). If you don’t see tune2fs in the list then we can enable it, and just in case you do see ‘dir_index’ in ‘Filesystem features’ then you have either enabled it already or it was automatically enabled for you.

You are going to need a Gentoo LiveCD because changing parameters on mounted filesystems can cause problems, so in the interest of safety we are booting off the CD. At the start phase the Gentoo install system is booted into what’s called a “ramdisk” which is where the files needed are put into RAM to be used. mke2fs, tune2fs and other parts of the e2fsprogs package will be present at this stage.

Now let’s turn on the feature with

Do a filesystem check with

Do that on any ext2 or ext3 partition and then reboot. You should notice the difference straight away.