Thursday, March 18, 2010

ext4 disable journal

At one high loaded web project I needed a very fast file system. I decided to use Ext4 with disabled journal (As a google:))).

# Create ext4 fs on /dev/sda10 disk
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda10

# Enable writeback mode. This mode will typically provide the best ext4 performance.
tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sda10

# Delete has_journal option
tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sda10

# Required fsck
e2fsck -f /dev/sda10

# Check fs options
dumpe2fs /dev/sda10 |more

For more performance add fstab opions: data=writeback,noatime,nodiratime
i.e:
/dev/sda10 /opt ext4 defaults,data=writeback,noatime,nodiratime 0 0

Tested at non-boot partition ;)

24 comments:

  1. are you really sure that this disables journaling?
    as far i know journal_data_writeback is just another journal mode which creates journal of meta data only,...

    ReplyDelete
  2. # Delete has_journal option
    tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sda10

    This step disables journal

    ReplyDelete
  3. Or when creating

    mkfs.ext4 -O ^has_journal /dev/sda10

    ReplyDelete
  4. Would you be able to help with the following issue:
    getting more r/w speed from a flash drive install
    http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/getting-more-r-w-speed-from-a-flash-drive-install-827164/

    Thanks in advance
    Iain

    ReplyDelete
  5. Could you explain what the purpose of the journal_data_writeback option is once the journal is disabled with the ^has_journal?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. it's needed to mount with data=writeback

      Delete
  6. I don't remember why I wrote this :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Oh wow thank for this bit of advice, I am now able to use ZFS on Linux with ext4 instead of ext2. The journaling feature of ext3-4 made ZFS snapshots work incorrectly. Now it works woo hoo!.

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  8. how to check the journal is enable or disable ?

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  9. dumpe2fs /dev/sda4 |grep 'Filesystem features'
    if has_journal option exist - you have journal

    ReplyDelete
  10. Thanks a lot ..................

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  11. I ended up here looking for the right command to remove journaling and thought this thread started some time ago, advice is still very good. My 2c for this are: add "discard" to the mount options in fstab

    /dev/sda10 /opt ext4 defaults,data=writeback,discard,noatime,nodiratime 0 0

    "discard" will enable trimming (see http://sites.google.com/site/lightrush/random-1/howtoconfigureext4toenabletrimforssdsonubuntu)

    Have a good one!

    Marcos Albe

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. trimming is for newer ssd only (some older ssd not support trim), and not for traditional hdd.

      Delete
    2. The above HowTo has been deprecated by the author.

      Delete
    3. The above HowTo has been deprecated by the author.

      Delete
  12. Thanks for posting this. Really helped our BigCouch cluster partitions. Couch is such a IO hog.

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  13. In the end of the text, for fstab, "nodiratime" is not necessary, as noatime already includes that option. This can be seen in http://lwn.net/Articles/244941/, http://lwn.net/Articles/245002/, and other texts.

    Roberto

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  14. Discard options is default in ext4

    Tejas

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  15. Adding discard is a terrible choice if your goal is performance. It is also meaningless for non-flash drives. If you have a flash drive, and performance is the goal, schedule a nightly fstrim cron job on the relevant partitions.

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  16. noatime already includes nodiratime, You don't need to specify both.
    https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/fstab#atime_options

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  17. noatime automatically enables nodiratime

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  18. superb one. i used this technique for porteus linux.

    ReplyDelete