Off all the journaled filesystems out there now ReiserFS is most likely
your safest bet. Mostly because it's supported from 2.2.19 on.

XFS locks you into 2.4.5 right now. (SGI has only released patches for
2.4.5, though they have Development patches for 2.4.6, 2.4.7, and
2.4.8-pre4)

IBM's JFS has been released as "stable." How well it actually works is
anyones guess. I don't know what kernels it's in or if IBM does patches
like SGI does.

ext3 is still a way off.

grub supports ReiserFS, but doens't speak XFS or JFS yet. (AFAIK anyway)

With any of the above file systems, you must remember one thing:
create your own rescue disk. The installer I used to get a 100% ReiserFS
system used kernel 2.2.19. The latest kernels (2.4.5, 2.4.6, 2.4.7) have a
newer version of ReiserFS than 2.2.19, and the new version is not
backwards compatible. ReiserFS filesystems can be updated to the latest
version of ReiserFS on the fly, so if you run a 2.4.5 kernel, your
filesystem gets updated, and 2.2.19 won't read your filesystem. *

[* This statement is based on what I read and what happened to me when I
tried switching from lilo to grub. ]

One question for me..are there ways to create a rescue floppy other than
mkrboot and make bzdisk?

Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://www.ringworld.org
"We can learn much more from wise words, little
from wisecracks and less from wise guys."
--William Arthur Ward