Reliable file systems

[Benjamin Roe]

I just had to hit the reset button during boot because of a hard lockup
(due to athcool, I think). Anyway, I've always used XFS for my systems
as it's been very reliable. However, this reboot seems to have
completely killed the filesystem. I had to run xfs_repair to get the
system to let me login, and even now half of /usr, most of apt's package
lists and various other things are either in lost+found or just gone.

I've always thought the point of journalled file systems was to avoid
this sort of thing. I was especially surprised as few of the files were
even open at the time of the reboot - it was quite early in the boot
sequence.

Does anyone have any good tips for making sure this kind of thing is
less likely to happen? Either mount options or alternative file systems,
I guess.

I can find benchmarks for Linux file systems, but nothing on their
reliability. I've had this happen with Reiserfs and ext3, but had hoped
that XFS would be better.

Ben