File Systems form Gentoo page
Gentoo Linux Documentation -- Preparing the Disks
Filesystems?The Linux kernel supports various filesystems. We'll explain ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, XFS and JFS as these are the most commonly used filesystems on Linux systems.ext2 is the tried and true Linux filesystem but doesn’t have metadata journaling, which means that routine ext2 filesystem checks at startup time can be quite time-consuming. There is now quite a selection of newer-generation journaled filesystems that can be checked for consistency very quickly and are thus generally preferred over their non-journaled counterparts. Journaled filesystems prevent long delays when you boot your system and your filesystem happens to be in an inconsistent state.