What are the "defaults" for file system options?

From man mount:

Ah I should have looked there.

Then it's safe to just add noatime and nodiratime.

The options are the same regardless of the file system (ext3, reiserfs etc.) right?

Thanks

Those options increase performance, and can just be added. Be sure to note, however, that some tools might work worse with them; For example, I heard that mutt gets confused by noatime. (I have been using noatime for a while without noticing any problems... but they are not completely safe)

(seen here)

So if you have noatime, nodiratime is not necessary because it is implied by the first.

I also added data=writeback to my fstab, the "risk" of this is that you may end up with old data in a file in case of an OS crash or power failure. The filesystem won't be corrupted, though. Since I don't run any cron jobs or such that *need* to have their data in the right state, this is good enough for me.

I just added noatime to my fstab (couple of devices) and also made the decision to implement this in EasyLFS, for 0.4 already. It will be an option, but it'll default to on I think.

I never use mutt. I suppose problems are very rare (which was also indicated in that article) so it should really be safe.

I see, thanks for pointing that out.

You mean when you save something to a file and there is a crash, it may actually end up showing the old file (previous to the last save) once rebooted?

If it's something much more subtler than that I can live with it, but for now I think it'd be safest without that option.

That sounds great.

Only when the crash happened while the OS was still busy writing the file to disk. How often does Linux crash anyway?

Ah I see, then it's quite safe. It never crashes really, and in exceptions to that rule the crash is related to a program which doesn't actually save important files, like games.

... and you shouldn't be playing games while editing important files anyway

Other options I use: user_xattr,acl

I think user_xattr is there for Git performance. acl is there because POSIX ACLs are a cool feature

What do those mean?

Actually, to be honest, I don't exactly know what noatime and data=writeback really mean either. I'm asking on behalf of anyone else reading this who may be wondering too.

Problems! Apparently the data=writeback thing causes some sort of an error on my ext3 root partition causing it to remount as readonly (as set in options). I removed that option now.

RTFM (it's man mount)

noatime: don't store access times on disk (-> a read is a read and leaves the FS as it was)
user_xattr: allow users to use custom POSIX extended file attributes. Git uses this to store metadata in the file system and speed itself up.
acl: Enable the use of POSIX ACLs (access control lists), a way to specify more granula file permissions on UNIX systems

Actually I did read man mount exactly because I expected someone to suggest me to read the fine manual. It's just that explanations there are quite minimal and susceptible to a bit of guesswork to those without deeper understanding of the context.

For user_xattr / nouser_xattr man says: "Support "user." extended attributes (or not)" Now that makes it so very immediately clear. Yeah right.

For noatime it says "Do not update inode access times on this file system (e.g, for faster access on the news spool to speed up news servers)." I guess that's a bit better, supposing you have any idea what an "inode" might be. Luckily I have only a vague idea.

Your response, however, was better than that.

Cheers

weird. I have reiserfs (can you tell I haven't installed the distro du jour for a while?), to be honest I don't know if the option actually does something on that fs...

I switched to noatime on both machines, my LFS-PC and my Fedora-notebook, both run ext3, both have survived the switch without any problems (so far). And for the notebook I can honestly say that now it's booting considerably faster; my PC already was booting pretty quick before, thanks to LFS (GUI-login after around 40 seconds; last time I stopped, which was still with my old hardware).