1 About File System Management in Oracle Linux

This chapter briefly describes local file system management in Oracle Linux. It also lists supported file systems in the operating system.

Oracle Linux supports a large number of local file system types that you can configure on block devices, including:

btrfs

Btrfs is a copy-on-write file system that is designed to address the expanding scalability requirements of large storage subsystems. It supports snapshots, a roll-back capability, checksum functionality for data integrity, transparent compression, and integrated logical volume management.

The maximum supported file or file system size is 50 TB.

For more information, see About the Btrfs File System.

ext3

The ext3 file system includes journaling capabilities to improve reliability and availability. Consistency checks after a power failure or an uncontrolled system shutdown are unnecessary. ext2 file systems are upgradeable to ext3 without reformatting.

See Converting a Non-root Ext2 File System to Ext3 and Converting a root Ext2 File System to Ext3.

The maximum supported file and file system sizes are 2 TB and 16 TB.

ext4

In addition to the features of ext3, the ext4 file system supports extents (contiguous physical blocks), pre-allocation, delayed allocation, faster file system checking, more robust journaling, and other enhancements.

The maximum supported file or file system size is 50 TB.

ocfs2

Although intended as a general-purpose, high-performance, high-availability, shared-disk file system intended for use in clusters, it is possible to use Oracle Cluster File System version 2 (OCFS2) as a standalone, non-clustered file system.

Although it might seem that there is no benefit in mounting OCFS2 locally as compared to alternative file systems such as ext4 or btrfs, you can use the reflink command with OCFS2 to create copy-on-write clones of individual files in a similar way to using the cp --reflink command with the btrfs file system. Typically, such clones allow you to save disk space when storing multiple copies of very similar files, such as VM images or Linux Containers. In addition, mounting a local OCFS2 file system allows you to subsequently migrate it to a cluster file system without requiring any conversion.

See Creating a Local OCFS2 File System.

The maximum supported file or file system size is 16 TB.

vfat

The vfat file system (also known as FAT32) was originally developed for MS-DOS. It does not support journaling and lacks many of the features that are available with other file system types. It is mainly used to exchange data between Microsoft Windows and Oracle Linux systems.

The maximum supported file size or file system size is 2 GB.

xfs

XFS is a high-performance journaling file system, which provides high scalability for I/O threads, file system bandwidth, file and file system size, even when the file system spans many storage devices.

The maximum supported file and file system sizes are 16 TB and 500 TB respectively.

For more information, see About the XFS File System.

To see what file system types your system supports, use the following command:

ls /sbin/mkfs.*
/sbin/mkfs.btrfs   /sbin/mkfs.ext3     /sbin/mkfs.msdos
/sbin/mkfs.cramfs  /sbin/mkfs.ext4     /sbin/mkfs.vfat
/sbin/mkfs.ext2    /sbin/mkfs.ext4dev  /sbin/mkfs.xfs

These executables are used to make the file system type specified by their extension. mkfs.msdos and mkfs.vfat are alternate names for mkdosfs. mkfs.cramfs creates a compressed ROM, read-only cramfs file system for use by embedded or small-footprint systems.