File systems
From Grokdoc
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ext2
The Second Extended File System is probably the most widely used filesystem in the Linux community. It provides standard Unix file semantics and advanced features. Moreover, thanks to the optimizations included in the kernel code, it is robust and offers excellent performance.
ext3
Ext3 is a journaling filesystem developed by Stephen Tweedie. It is compatible to ext2 filesystems; actually you can look at it as an ext2 filesystem with a journal file. The journaling capability means no more waiting for fsck's or worrying about metadata corruption. What is most noticeable is that you can switch back and forth between ext2 and ext3 on a partition without any problem: it is just a matter of giving the mount command the right filesystem type.
reiserfs
reiserfs is a revolutionary new approach to file system design which stores not just filenames but the files themselves in a B*-tree. It is a generation ahead of alternatives which use older plain B-tree technology, and cannot store the files themselves in the tree. Reiserfs doesn't suffer from log congestion either, you can effectively use it for quickly creating a 100,000 entry directory, and it is fairly unique in that.
xfs
XFS is a journalling filesystem developed by SGI and used in SGI's IRIX operating system. It is now also available under GPL for linux. It is extremely scalable, using btrees extensively to support large and/or sparse files, and extremely large directories. The journalling capability means no more waiting for fsck's or worrying about meta-data corruption.
jfs
IBM's journaled file system technology, currently used in IBM enterprise servers, is designed for high-throughput server environments, key to running intranet and other high-performance e-business file servers. IBM is contributing this technology to the Linux open source community with the hope that some or all of it will be useful in bringing the best of journaling capabilities to the Linux operating system.
