Hi there,

I wonder what's the best filesystem for the SD card. I grew tired of not having softlinks in the original VFAT filesystem, so right now I'm using EXT2 (mounted with -o sync), but in some occasions when the GP2X hangs the filesystem is corrupted.

I was thinking there might be better options, perhaps YAFFS or JFFS, but I am not certain wether using these filesystems will be an improvement.

So I'm throwing this question at you, what filesystem do you guys use for your SD card? Has anyone here tried anything besides EXT2? Could you tell me about your experiences?

Thanks!

Well I'm a Windows man, so FAT is what I use.
I've only had one problem and that was me being stupid rather than anything the unit did to the SD card.

Works well in the 2x and also the Card reader.

Can't get better than that for me.

I've only ever tried FAT32.

If we use FAT, it can be used like any other flash storage device. On windows, anything else is useless. (Don't tell me about the windows ext2 drivers, I know)
Ext2, is practical for linux people like me, but I don't think the advantages are worth it.

I would say stick to ext2 or use fat.

Never tried anything else though, and currently using fat.

I too am a linux based entity. I formatted my SD card as ext2, but it didn't work when I tried it in the 2x.... I'm guessing I need to setup ethernet over USB and telnet in to mount it manually, and edit some boot scripts so it works?
I found myself emerging dosfstools to set it back to FAT32..... Dark times indeed.

Yes, I just modified both the start.sh script and /etc/fstab . I did it over telnet. You could do it with a script but I think the telnet way is easier, also to debug if you have any troubles mounting your sd. Just plug the gp2x, modprobe usbnet, ifconfig your usb0 and you're set.

Can't you create symbolic links in FAT32 that can be understood by Linux still? I recall doing that once or twice before. Could be remembering wrong, but I recall just doing the usual ln -s routine.

The FAT32 filesystem does not support symbolic links. There is, however, UMSDOS, which is an overlay filesystem for FAT which does allow symbolic links and other Unix stuff, but does so storing the extra information in a special file (named --linux-.---). AFAIK development of UMSDOS has been discontinued.

There is, or used to be, or was going to be, something similar for FAT32, called UVFAT, but AFAIK its development was abandoned too.

Perhaps I am thinking of symbolic links pointing to resources ON fat32 volumes FROM ext2/3 ones.

why don't you create a tiny ext2 filesystem (let's say 16mb) in a file and place every soft link there, then you add a line into fstab to use /mnt/sd/link.ext2 to mount in /mnt/ext

then you can place any link you want into /mnt/ext, can even copy the whole sd into ext just by linking....

when you work it on windows you're just going to see a simple link.ext2 file and every link is missing, naturally

Thanks for that. I'll get telnetting right away. Anyone tried ext3 yet? My filesystems are ext3 for the main and ext2 for my /boot. ext3 is ext2 + journalising, so use mk2fs with the -J option to do ext3 (or just us mkfs.ext3 if you have that) I suppose someone needs to test and benchmark all the filesystems....

I think the gp2x's gnu/linux doesn't read ext3 as it is. I haven't checked though. I suppose you could add ext3 support if you really wanted it. Of course, you can always mount ext3 partitions as ext2 (but they will behave as ext2 partitions, of course; ie, without journaling)

Use FAT/FAT32, unless you want a bunch of issues with apps not running because of case-sensitivity.