Custom filesystem?

You can create a raw disk in the Linode Manager, attach it to your profile, reboot, then create an XFS filesystem on the new raw disk.

The only consideration I would keep in mind is that if you decide to extend this disk in Linode Manager, it won't extend the filesystem for you automatically like it would for ext3 disks. You will have to grow the filesystem from within the OS.

Also, you can't shrink raw disks…. but XFS doesn't support shrinking anyway, as far as I know.

If you wanted to have your root disk be on an XFS filesystem, you might be able to copy the files from the ext3 disk to the XFS disk. I have not attempted this though.

Also, the Linode backup service will not be able to back up that filesystem.

@hoopycat:

Also, the Linode backup service will not be able to back up that filesystem.
That hasn't been true for a while now - perhaps over a year. The Linode Backup Service will work on most any common filesystem these days. However, restores will be placed into our default filesystem type (currently ext3).

-Chris

I stand corrected! Most excellent. Disregard my last.

In my experience filesystems still do matter on VPS, or at least some of them do.

I have some use cases matching reiserfs ideal (10's of thousands of small files) and it's definitely faster than ext3 on linode. I also run some jfs partitions (many very large files) and it works well although I haven't done actual performance comparison vs. ext3.

I think some filesystems that are closer to the hardware, like zfs and hfs, wouldn't be as good on a VPS… assuming they would even run.

Why not ext4? The migration is fairly simple.