Faster mkfs.ext3

[Andreas Dilger]

On May 02, 2007  14:16 -0400, David Shaw wrote:
> I'm currently working with a testing system that involves running
> mkfs.ext3 on some pretty large devices on a regular basis.  This is
> getting fairly painful, and I was wondering if there was some way to
> speed this up.  Understood that the end result might be a filesystem
> that has less of a safety factor (say, fewer superblock backups) but
> the tradeoff might be worth it in this case.

Do you actually need to use the whole filesystem afterward?  Is the
performance of the filesystem a critical feature?

If not, then you can use "mke2fs -J size=4 -O lazy_bg ..." to make
a smaller journal (to avoid zeroing it out) and not zero out the
inode tables.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Principal Software Engineer
Cluster File Systems, Inc.