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ResierFS In Latest 2.4.1 Prepatches
Fluffy the Cat writes: "ReiserFS has appeared in the latest 2.4.1 prepatches on ftp.kernel.org. 2.4.1pre6 has a one-line error fixed in 2.4.1pre7, but it looks pretty certain that Linux will have a full jfs in 2.4.1." It will be interesting to see what's going to happen in the new development cycle, alright. The Kernel Developer Summit will have some interesting fruit, I'd wager.
There were people working on another file system called Charon(sp?)... has that project died, as I've not heard any updates. From an initial read in a news group the features sounded promising.
I assume this is fixed by now btw, this has been confirmed to happen with 3.5.28 anyway...
Hi.
I first got exposure to the Reiserfs with Mandrake 7.1. I was very impressed.
It is very fast, has been (mostly) stable and makes hard reboots very tolerable. Also, I don't tend to get the errors I would on an ext2fs, theoretically because it's journaling.
ReiserFS is a lit more than just a journaling file system though. Those interested should really check out namesys.com. They're striving for a filesystem with plugins, so it would be very extendable. Also, they way it stores information and searches is quite different.
A few words of caution though: I had major issues with a few of the bundled ReiserFS tools with the 2.4.0test series patches on my Debian Woody machine. Maybe they've stabilized since then, but I ruined my filesystem trying to fix some very odd ReiserFS related errors.
To be fair, I was running tools that clearly stated they were a last resort. When they warn you not to do something, believe it.
I am presently running 2.4.0 with the ReiserFS patch from namesys. I've been running it since 2.4.0 came out and have had no issues, but I'm still using the tools that ship with the latest 2.2.x patch, as they are more stable for me.
So, try ReiserFS, you?ll like it. Also, if you?re going to use the tools (like mkreiserfs) use the tools from the 2.2.x branch of patches. (ReiserFS version 3.5.x rather than 3.6.x) as they seem more stable..
Anyway, the end result is that my system is very stable and very fast. Having seen the obvious deficiencies with ext2 (a server at work has 100+GB of RAID Ext2fs partitions. We had an NFS bug that caused flooding and crashing a while ago. It took about 45 minutes to an hour to reboot.) the ReiserFS seems like a great improvement. I'm glad to see that it'll enter into the main kernel.
Hmm.. of course another obvious drawback with all of these new filesystems is that, to my knowledge, there are no tools for other Operating Systems to read the new filesystems. For example, you can mount ext2 partitions in BeOS, but ReiserFS is out. So, if you?re running multiple OSs then you may want to keep at least one ext2 or maybe a FAT32 partition.
Hope this helps,
Ben
Sure, but how many years was he in the 8th Grade?
This Sig has been depreciated.
I would like to get started with linux and leave my old platform behind, what is the best distribution and how do I attain it? Thanks
I had the EXACT same problem, excpept that it had nothing todo with NFS. I just had a lockup one day, rebooted, and 3 files gave me that same problem. I switched everything back to ext2 . . .
15GB? 70GB? /bin/df -kl|awk '{A+=$2}END{print A}'
#
3105046413
All vxfs, of course.
I have 30 gigs on this machine alone, but I manage to fit everything that's important onto a single 15 gig DLT tape (and a few unimportant partitions because they'll fit.)
Use some common sense; not all 80 gigs are worth backing up.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Why is that article (the one at http://www.osdn.com/conf/kernel/conf_index.shtml) dated March 30 - 31 2001? Last I checked, thats another 2 and a half months away.
In a word, yes. I am running Resierfs on some Squid boxes, each with between 17gb and 200gb of disk spread across a raid 0 striped LVM volume, and Reiserfs has been nothing short of a miracle if one of the boxes goes down for any reason other than a planned reboot. An hour long fsck on a web cache that (unfortunately) doesn't always leave an alternate method of retreiving pages to users on the inside just is NOT acceptable, so Reiserfs has really saved the day for me.
YMMV, of course. I'm using LVM with striping, so this isn't technically RAID - what you refer to is most likely the linux md device with the raid personalities. However, I'm betting the same idea applies, as you should be able to put whatever filesystem you want on a logical volume.
The rationale is that Reiserfs packs tails (fragments) unless you give it the notail mount option. If your /boot directory is on a
Reiserfs, it should be
mounted notail if you don't have Lilo 21.6 (which does understand Reiser tails).
(if using notail, add it to the mount options in /etc/fstab for whatever file system /boot is located on.)
I think not. I was informing the gentleman that this is in fact the way that Free software development works, and hoping to dispell the confusion caused by his misinterpretation of the article. How much more on topic can you get?
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
I'm sorry for saying it, and I should know better than to feed an obvious troll, but you're an idiot. This is how Linux kernel development works. We have finished creating 2.4.0, it works, it rocks, and now we start working on the next version. Sure, it will include bug fixing on things that we probably managed to miss in 2.4.0 (for instance, fat32 doesn't work on 64bit systems in 2.4.0, as if that matters), but now we can start adding new features. This isn't the same idea as MS and their infinite servicepacks to NT 4, this is actual, honest to goodness progress, and it is good that way.
This howto involved creating a seperate partition and copying your data over to it, then switching lilo to boot off of it. As far as I have seen there is no easy way to upgrade directly from ext2 to reiserfs...
reiserfsck
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
OK, I understand that. But that being the case, how can it possibly by 15% faster than ext2 as people are claiming here. Are there that many inefficiencies in ext2 that are resolved in reiserfs?
I thought I remember reading that NTFS was slower than FAT32 because it used journalling. Is that the case? Is it at all relevant? Will I ever stop asking questions?
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
It is, in fact, pretty much the default on SuSE 7.0. That's why I am using it on this box: my 40Gb partition fscks faster than I can read it. This can't be a bad thing!
-- And when Justice is gone, there is always... Force. --Laurie Anderson, "Oh Superman"
On ext2, I see slightly faster (~10%) on per character io, and significantly faster (30-50%) on block io.
This is on the same partition on the same disk. The reiser page, of course, says how much faster it is than ext2, but I can't verify that. Has anyone else seen anything similar? I recently read a review of reiser that came up with the same results... although I can't find that review now.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Because I never kick out power cables. Instead I compulsively flick those huge red switches you find in IT operations rooms.
This is why linux has not been the enterprise choice; when it costs you x thousand dollars for a minute of downtime, you want that server back up as quickly as possible. Now we just have to have the FS war; ext3, reiser, jfs, xfs....:)
It's an imporatant corner stone, certainly. Like better SMP support and the LVM. On a cached (by the OS) disk sub system you don't want to install a productive database device on a file system.
But the real reason of course, is that the decision makers (senior management) don't have clippy, the paper clip which should be shot at their disposal.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
I've been using ReiserFS on a few machines. Primarily, it is the filesystem on my 40gb MP3 drives, and when 2.4.0 and the corresponding Reiserfs patch arrived, I actually switched my /usr partition over... it does feel noticeably faster, but I use it with certain caveats. First, these are personal machines, not multi-user, and second, I have backups of my data offsite.
It's great for my purposes, but it's not a true journaling filesystem, it simply journals metadata, which, while allowing for fast fscks, it doesn't protect your data as well as IBM's filesystem or SGI's will.
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
If you dont like the advertising I assume you could just edit the source and remove it. Theres a Swansea University advert in the bootup for 2.2.x kernels. Doesnt bother me, I dont boot up much.
All this AFAIK, but I can be proven wrong once again...
> wow, something ever other OS has had for years
Huh ? Since when windows 95/95 have a journalling FS ? Since when Mac OS have a journalling FS ? Since when NeXTstep/OPENSTEP/Mac OS X Server have a journalling file system ? Or Mac OS X ?
> Now maybe Linux can get a user-friendly GUI?
OSes with a user-friendly GUI and a journalling filesystem are BeOS and WinNT/Win2K.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
For further details on Reiser FS, check out this page. Freshmeat links to it, but I'm not entirely certain it works (I can't bring it up from here).
Also note that the maker of the file system, Hans Reiser, is suing Microsoft for the information that he needs to market the filesystem to Windows users :)
My karma's bigger than yours!
SIG: HUP
Yes, Microsoft only took 20 years to provide an OS with a journalling file system - I guess that's innovation in action.
Okay, so when will someone make a good reiserfsck?
--
The ReiserFS developers had been tracking 2.3.x kernels for quite a while; they were in the process of auditing the interfaces to the VFS layer at the time that 2.3.x got "frozen" in preparation for release of 2.4.
The fact that this took place rather a long time ago and that there were a serious lot of "pre-2.4.0" versions is a conspicuous fact.
As for the "fighting," it was resolved in two directions:
It should be noted that "vigorous flaming" does not necessarily indicate personal acrimony; there are rather a lot of "spirited words" said around the kernel lists that really are technical comments. If someone thinks that some particular code is severely braindamaged, there is no fear of saying so. If the author, or someone else, fixes it, that's well and fine and may result in the inclusion of what used to be "braindamaged."
The complexity of the sizable and steadily growing group of "competing interests" in the Linux kernel is certainly making it more difficult over time to do major releases. If the process gets much more difficult, that's the sort of thing that is liable to result either in fragmentation or in people deciding to jump over to one of the BSDs or perhaps even to Hurd. Not that that those directions are likely tremendously relevant to the deployment of ReiserFS...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Before reiserfs had logging, I believe it was much faster for many many small files, and slghtly faster for common cases. Of course journalling is going to make it slower on the average than a non-journalling file system, however I'm willing to bet that certain extreme types of file types are still faster than ext2 due to the optimized nature of storage on reiserfs. (Go read the white papers for details.)
I used to have reiserfs with notail, nolog and noatime mount options on my Squid cache partitions for extra speed, and the fact that in the event of a crash the system could easily mkreiserfs instead of fsck, because Squid cache data isn't very important to keep. The system did so only once, due to the cable technician tripping over the power chord.
Back then I did benchmarks using simulated Squid test loads on ext2 vs reiserfs with and without journalling enabled. Of course journalling disabled was clearly faster than ext2, but reiser journalling enabled was not statistically different from ext2 in several test runs. It might be something about the nature of squid cache files.
Now I no longer run a Squid server, but I believe they added another mount option specifically for additional Squid performance which does away with filenames. (Not sure about this.)
As for non-Squid server usage, it would be dumb to not activate journalling if your data is important to you. reiserfsck has been somewhat lacking in the ability to fix corrupted filesystems.
Bottom line - Journalling is good. Save hours of fsck time, get your enterprise servers back up quickly and save your job. I'd say that's well worth a negligible performance hit for most servers.
Thanks for the Link. Actually it appears that XFS fares the best of all the filesystems. I attended a Linux Road Tour from SGI about a year ago. I attended a session on XFS and I was truly blown away by it's capabilities. XFS on IRIX is truly amazing and for SGI to opening up the specs for the Linux community is truly admirable. XFS is SGI's crown jewels and they are giving it to the community. For more on XFS, read this. Alternatively, you can watch a streaming video about XFS here. XFS will be the industrial strength filesystem that will push Linux into the High Availability server arena. For desktops, ReiserFS should still be sufficient.
You all try to explain why it's okay that Linus allowed ReiserFS into the 2.4.1-pre series, and whether or not he violated his own submission policy. I'll tell you why it doesn't matter one way or the other:
IT'S LINUS'S FUCKING KERNEL. One of the best perks of building your own operating system kernel is the ability to set policy as you see fit. If he sets a no-submission policy, and then allows Hans Reiser's patches into the kernel, his policy is now to only allow Hans Reiser to submit patches. It may change tomorrow. Why you gripe about his conformance to his own policy is beyond me. You shouldn't care what Linus does with his kernel, it's his; you don't have to use it if you don't like it.
Oh, and to back up another correspondent in this thread, indeed, Linus did announce plans to include ReiserFS in 2.4.1 long ago, in an online interview. Or maybe it was print. But I saw it. In fact, everybody has been saying ReiserFS would make it into 2.4.1 for a long time.
PS -- No doubt, in an attempt to attack me, someone will tell me it should be "Linus'" instead of "Linus's"... but no, the apostrophe-s belongs there. If you disagree, I urge you to consult the fabulous writing handbook Elements of Style by White. At least, I think it's White... but the title is certainly correct.
A new year calls for a new signature.
But, when I made two such directories inside each other and CDed into the last, the path returned by pwd got chopped to only the last directory, since paths can't be more than 4096 characters long, AFAIK.
© 2000 Ilmari. All ritghts reserved, all wrongs reversed
© ilmari. All rights reserved, all wrongs reversed
Finally, linux has the holy grail of industrial strength operating systems! This is the one major reason why i use mandrake now, who wants to wait for a fscking fsck?
/. poster #104543567
-stax
In the 'real world' we see that there aren't a whole vastly lot of manufacturers of knives; while there are a bunch, it doesn't tend to be something that just everyone does. I don't make knives; I buy them.
Heading the point towards ReiserFS, it seems unlikely to me that everyone will be writing "plugins" for ReiserFS. In practice, there will be a few important plugins that will get looked at pretty carefully before deployment:
In much the way that writing kernel code is less convenient than writing user space code, due to the lack of many of the Standard C Library services that people expect to find, writing ReiserFS plugins is likely to be sufficiently "inconvenient" as to discourage "just any moron" from widespread deployment of oddball plugins.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Lightweight? You have any 70GB RAID _laptops_ kicking about the place? .. You do? I can have one? It'll be in the post by the weekend? Cool, and thanks!! :)
:)
p.s. My sig is totally and utterly out of date
--
Azrael - The Angel of Death
posted with: Mozilla (0.7)
Obviously, the size of the patch matters too: if you can make an obvious fix in 5 lines, do it. Don't try to make a clean fix that fixes the problem the clever way in 150 lines.
Uh. Yeah. Promote dirty hacks. Please.
it's in my head
My recipe for disaster was to have a really big benchmark running.
You've say that XFS is very impressive, and that you've switched from ReiserFS to XFS.
:)
Can you elaborate as to why you switched, using quantitative data? Does XFS boot faster after a crash? Does it require less memory? Is it faster for n-sized files? Is it faster for n-way SMP systems? Is it more secure, more reliable? Do you have any repeatable benchmarks?
Inquiring minds want to know
-OT
features: well, it's fast, especially in edge cases like many thousands of files in a directory, where ext2 has trouble. Transaction support is coming too, which could be pretty neat. The speed used to be better than ext2, and is now slightly worse (pretty good for journalling), and will probably improve once a stable point is reached and some energy is spent reoptimizing.
32k subdirs: no, I don't believe that limitation exists. Most every limit of that sort has been pushed out to 2**32 or 2**64. I'm not sure I'm remembering properly, though.
Will the version included in 2.4.1 be labelled as stable or expirimental ?... I've seem numerous posts on BugTraq lately concerning ReiserFS.
Futhermore i've read somewhere "don't use the filesystem on systems which allow 'average' users to access the reiserfs-filesystem". Can anyone tell me what they mean by this ?.. is it 'not safe' or what ?...
The more usual literature on "namespaces" can be found discussed with The Use of Name Spaces in Plan 9. That's actually a quite useful/relevant thing that would represent a really cool thing to add to Linux in the future.
The critical extension is that rather than mount being associated with a "global" filesystem space, where all mounted FSes are associated with /etc/mtab it is associated with a particular hierarchy of processes.
Thus, my user ID might mount a DBM file via something analagous to mount -t dbm /home/cbbrowne/data/something.dbm /n/something ; that presents the DBM file in some sort of filesystem mode under /n/something . Unlike traditional mounting:
Alex Viro has occasionally commented on this being a potential neat thing to add to Linux; that's what would make "namespaces" really cool and useful; I don't see it happening 'til Linux 2.7, and it absolutely should not have anything to do with a particular filesystem implementation.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
That's "...should bear some interesting fruit..."
Can you run ReiserFS on a software RAID-[045] device yet?
I'm tired of waiting for reiserfs patches in order to upgrade a kernel. It's about the time.
Nice to see ReiserFS is included in the 2.4.1 Kernel. I am using it for 1,5 or so Years now and never had problems, except that one time where a Ram chip barfed. In my eyes ReiserFS is a stable and proven Filesystem, which is a lot more efficient and faster than ext2.
-- If windows is the solution, can we please have the problem back?
Okay, okay, this is good and bad. At least Linus and the others are still ironing out the kinks in the kernel, but come on, wasn't it supposed to work right the first time?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I've goot zillions of terabytes of harddisk, formatted with journaling-FAT16 my Commodore Plus/4.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Keep in mind it really hasn't been ported to anything other than x86. I hear the ports that are being done are targetted for the 2.4.x series.
I hope so... fsck on my SMP Sparc 10 box can be a slow process. The 2.2.18 patch is forgets to do a #define in errno.h and the utilities that come with it Bus error.
Brian Macy
In file systems, one thing, and one thing alone is paramount: data integrity. Performance and efficiency is irrelevant. You need a very esoteric application before this is no longer true.
ext2 is proven code. reiserFS just isn't as proven.
The big question is whether the additional integrity reiserFS gains from journalling outweighs its lack of stress testing.
Currently, I'm still more comfortable with ext2, but reiserFS is rapidly catching up. I figure I'll let another 100000 kids on the block install it first, and if they survive, I'll join too.
The thin layer approach wins in this situation -- your distate aside -- as it is easier to prove to yourself that you aren't violating the proven code's assumptions in the thin layer than it is to prove that you've successfully re-implemented the stability in a new architecture.
Eventually we do need to re-architect, but those re-implementation are to be viewed with extreme suspicion. So I'm paranoid, but I don't have any backups.
...is how to pronounce it? Ricer FS? Raiser FS? Riser FS?
-- And when Justice is gone, there is always... Force. --Laurie Anderson, "Oh Superman"
2.2.17
I for one would be quite happy if someone competent ported the BSD UFS to Linux. It'd be great to have a unified file system between both platforms.
My HP-UX systems at work have Oracle datafiles in the 10gig range.
I want to set Linux up as a standby server with identical data files, just to compare performance, but this can't be done on stock ext2, which enforces a 2gig limit on file size.
I hope ReiserFS fixes this.
I really apreciate all your help, especially since it's actually a RTFM issue.
The material and documentation (same as software, from brilliant to outright rotten) is so overwhelming that it's really hard to delve through and pick the really important stuff.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
and the short fsck times are definately nice.
Nice? That sounds more like embarassing.
Is the ability to mount with journaling introduced when you install Solstice Disksuite, or do you get that ability when loading the plain vanilla Solaris 8?
If you had to load Disksuite, did you have to load a new kernel, or did it just throw on some modules?
Pardon the questions of a Solaris neophyte. I guess I should check the man pages.
If, on the other hand, ReiserFS significantly changed the VM subsystem or the VFS layer, you would be right, but you didn't bother to actually look at the ReiserFS patch, did you?
ReiserFS only adds a one-line function to fs/buffer.c (only used by ReiserFS) and four lines to fs/inode.c (a special case for ReiserFS). There are a few other minor changes to fs.h as well. So, it's a really small patch as far as the existing code base is concerned.
-Matthead
-Matthead
I guess we just have different priorities then. On my home machine, I would much rather have performance than data integrity (up to a point of course ;) Of course, I have scripts sync my data directories to my trusty FreeBSD server, so a data loss wouldn't hit me as hard. Of course, I wouldn't run a green filesystem on by BSD server, so I guess I can see where you're coming from. I still think you should invest in a good tape drive and live on the edge a little ;)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I'm running Reiserfs+2.4.x over two 60GB drives (no raid, just straight partitioning). Running Sybase, doing NFS-based backups of a bunch of systems, etc. Very, very nice! Use it at home, my machine at work, and the 5GB spools on our print servers.
But then why should I backup my data ?
;-)
Because not doing so is the metaphorical equivalent of flopping your wedding tackle into a lions mouth and flicking his love-spuds with a wet towel. Total insanity!
Shamelessly stolen from Red Dwarf, but an apt quote. If you're going to mess with your filesystems, back them up. Nuff said.
This was sendt to the kernel list a week ago by Linus: http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel /0101.0/1192.html
This is the interesting part:
I thought I'd mention the policy for 2.4.x patches so that nobody gets confused about these things. In some cases people seem to think that "since 2.4.x is out now, we can relax, go party, and generally goof off".
Not so.
The linux kernel has had an interesting release pattern: usually the .0
release was actually fairly good (there's almost always _something_
stupid, but on the whole not really horrible). And every single time so
far, .1 has been worse. It usually takes until something like .5 until
it has caught up and surpassed the stability of .0 again.
Why? Because there are a lot of pent-up patches waiting for inclusion, that didn't get through the "we need to get a release out, that patch can wait" filter. So early on in the stable tree, some of those patches make it. And it turns out to be a bad idea.
In an effort to avoid this mess this time, I have two guidelines:
- I've basically thrown away all patches sent to me so far, and I will continue to do so at least over the weekend. I'm not going to bother thinking about patches for a few days.
- In order for a patch to be accepted, it needs to be accompanied by some pretty strong arguments for the fact that not only is it really fixing bugs, but that those bugs are _serious_ and can cause real problems.
Obviously, the size of the patch matters too: if you can make an obvious fix in 5 lines, do it. Don't try to make a clean fix that fixes the problem the clever way in 150 lines.
In short, releasing 2.4.0 does not open up the floor to just about anything. In fact, to some degree it will probably make patches _less_ likely to be accepted than before, at least for a while. I want to be absolutely convicned that the basic 2.4.x infrastructure is solid as a rock before starting to accept more involved patches.
RFC1925
Background: One of the benifits of a jfs is being able to 'roll-back' changes or to select a specific revision without rolling back the current version.
Q. What file systems are available that can do this, and what tools are available to get back intermediate revisions of a specific file or directory tree.
With cheap disk space, this looks like it would be a great tool to have, while faster boot time is less valuable unless you are running a time critical application and any delay is a bad thing.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
ReiserFS was planned to be included in 2.4.1 .
I cannot quote the message but sure it was on l-k.
2.Ext2 is more proactive in maintaining filesystem integrity.
GiraffeSville, a place anyone can call home
I have been using ReiserFS with SuSE for a while but one thing that always bothered me is that lilo can't boot the kernel off a partition with ReiserFS so I always need at least one ext2 partition just for this purpose. I heard LILO was starting to support Reiser, anyone know for sure?
fair 'nuff. I've often conscidered getting a tape drive, but can ill afford the IDE slot (SCSI is not an option for economic reasons). What I should do is reshuffle my drives to make a smallish raid mirrored partition (is that raid-0?) for my important work and run something fun on the the rest of the drives.
Unfortunately, my sys admin skills are unexceptional. I can't even make NFS work after restoring my file server to RedHat 2.2.16 compliance. I need to free up a weekend to fix this, but it's ski season, and a man's got to have priorities.
I have the 'infamous' dual celerons on abit bp6. Since I was having some serious lockups with 2.4 test kernels, I made the move to reiserFS. Fsck on Ext2 takes for ever if you have a large filesystem with lots of small files (my source files & MP3s).
/dev/hdaN' would create a file system.
/usr/home.tar /home)
/home
/dev/<whatever mounts to home>
/etc/fstab' and change the file sytem type from ext2 --> reiserfs
/home' (at this point make sure your kernel is 'reiserfs enabled' (how is another story))
/home; tar xvfp /usr/home.tar (will unpack everything)
Mandrake 7.2 will let you mark a partition as ReiserFs. So I did that (backed up all my data ofcourse). You could use Fdisk I guess. Then just a 'mkreiserfs
For those who can't afford a re-install, here is a quickie..
0) telinit 1 (single user mode)
1) back up the drive in a tar file first
(tar cvpf
2) umount
3) mkreiserfs
4) 'vi
5) now 'mount
6) cd
7) repeat for all desired partitons
I have been running reiserFS with 2.4.0 (real thing) for a month now. And I am extremely happy with it. I am looking forward to the day where kernel has reiserfs included (rather than have to patch it - which is very straightforward too)
LinuxLover
i had tried reiser previously and it ate my disk
I had the same thing happen, where a root partition filled up with invisible data no files could account for, until a reinstall was required. XFS, in contrast, has never suffered from this. While XFS is beta, I have found it to be better behaved than reiser in this respect, and rock solid thus far.
Don't get me wrong, I like both reiser and XFS (haven't tried ext3 yet), but why reiser should make it into the kernel and XFS not, given my personal experiences which would indicate that, if anything, the opposite order of inclusion would have been more warranted, is beyond me.
There must be other technical and/or political issues involved of which I am unaware. It is, however, no big deal, since the XFS CVS tree is simple enough to download and works great, so while it is less convinient than having it in the official tree would be, and arguably unfair, the decision by no means denies me my own freedom of choice, which, in the end, is what running Linux is all about.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
For ext3, you create a journal file on your ext2 fs, umount, and mount as ext3.
-Matthead
-Matthead
Quick question, I am using ext3 right now because (one reason) easy upgradability. I recall hearing that if you wanted to upgrade reiserfs, you had to re-format the partition in order to use it. Has that changed? Can I umount and remount a partition in order to use an updated resierfs filesystem? I have looked at the resierfs page and haven't been able to find any information.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
However, I would like to throw in some points:
ReiserFS is superb code, IMHO, and provides a much-needed journalling file-system to the kernel. But the timing is not good. By now, the series should have reached a hard freeze, to start moving into production code. But this is a BIG change, suggesting that 2.4.x is really a slushy 2.3.x that's been bumped up early.
Now, it's arguable that ReiserFS has received plenty of testing, is a good system, et al, all of which is true. I won't dispute any of that. My concern is that it should have gone in much sooner (at the latest, in the 2.4.0pre stage, to iron things out), as waiting until 2.5 is a bit stupid.
By adding it now, though, the precident has been set. Development code CAN be added to the Stable series, with the inevitable consequence that Linus is going to get a battering from wannabe kernel hackers.
Rule #1: Once you start paying Dane Gold, expect to keep on paying. It won't get any better, if you go down that road.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
A 15Gb root partition? Are you totally nuts?
What happens if ReiserFS *can't* recover for some reason? You don't stand a cat's chance in hell of getting anything back. Try using more than one partition.
-Dom
I'm using reiserfs since nearly 6 months on a low-hardware box. I can say, it's runs perfectly. I experience lot's of unexpected crashes (power supply isn't best) but reiserfs saved me from a real data loss.
I haven't checked latest releases, but until three months ago there were some problems with RAID devices and reiserfs..hope that's fixed.
For comparision of JFS, XFS, Ext3, and ReiserFs see http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue55/florido.html
Ok, here is reiserfs utils directory for linux-2.4.1-pre7
ftp://ftp.reiserfs.org/pub/2.4/linux-2.4.1-pre7-r
To use it just put the patch in "linux/../" directory with pure linux-2.4.1-pre7 and :
# bzcat linux-2.4.1-pre7-reiserfs-utils-patch.bz2 | patch -p0
Also, there is a patch to fs/super.c which you should apply if you are using ReiserFS for a root filesystem.
You can see the message and the patch here:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=reiserfs&m=9796521 9413577&w=2
Maybe now ReiserFS will get ported to other architectures, so my little multia MP3 server won't take forever fscking the 20G data partition :-)
In My experience at my last position....
ext3 just feels like a kludge. It's not very elegant, but does offer a simple upgrade and degrades to ext2 when mount as such.
jfs is still having issues (in the latest freshmeat announcement fifos are now working.
Mostly I'm glad that reiser will be in the kernel. It's in my opinion the most stable and elegant so far.
Don't panic. Don't spread FUD. This has been worked around in the latest prereleases from Alan Cox. A hard limit on the length of filenames has been set as a temporary fix.
Many people on the linux kernel mailing list could never reproduce it anyway.
At any rate, the issue is being studied and a better fix is "coming soon". You can be sure that by the time there's a real 2.4.1 that the problem will have been solved.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
This is a very bad assed encrypted filesystem. Also take a look at this. So you can have encryption today. Have fun.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Hi,
as somebody else said, you really should check out www.namesys.com as soon as the slashdot effect wears off.
ReiserFS is much more than just a journaling file system with a tree structure. It has also some functionality from databases and full text search in the file name space. It therefore combines the advantages of the search engine (just enter some words), the database (strict mappings from key to value) and the classic tree structure.
It can also handle extremely small files efficiently, so that you do not have to write storage layers for your object oriented applications. If you want to store something that is 50 bytes large, you just create a file to store it, and it will not consume insane amounts of memory in your harddisk.
This means that you can boost the performance of everything that uses small files (some simple databases, mail and news servers, apache etc.) significantly by switching to ReiserFS.
People often complain that the open source software model does not produce many really new technologies: ReiserFS is one of those new technologies. It might even be the "killer application" for linux two years from now.
greetings,
AC
The only thing that worries me is that SGI has commented that they "won't support competing standards" (paraphrased) if the community chooses something other than their work. I would like to know where this is be stated? This has never been part of SGI's mission with regards to linux. Please email comments linux-xfs@oss.sgi.com Russell Cattelan
It's called maintenance branch vs. development branch. My company does the same thing, and it works wonderfully.
--
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Can NTFS pack multiple files or fragments into a single cluster? I think this is what ReiserFS does. I know XFS does this, and ext2 might someday.
Fragmentation sucks in NT. As does the 4GB limit on partitions you create at install time. What the hell is up with that? Format as FAT, convert to NTFS? Give me a break.
As fas as other features go, where the hell is quota support? Yeah, I know, Win2000, but you're talking about NT4, you say. Also, I know NTFS supports streams, but I've never seen them used. It's a cool idea - similar to HFS forks, right?
-Matthead
-Matthead
...and you know. I thought the trolls were lying when they reprinted this but now it's happened to me.
Slow down cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait 1 minute between each submission of /comments.pl in order to allow everyone to have a fair chance to post.
It's been 1 minute since your last submission!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
It's in the reiserfs FAQ -- this isn't strictly a reiserfs problem, but more a problem with the linux KNFSD (shipped as nfsd in many distribs).
There is a patch to fix this, but unfortunately it is against the -test10 kernel. By 'visual diff'ing the failed hunks, I have a patch that works on 2.4.0. After I test it a few more days, I will post it to the reiserfs mailing list. If you want it, mail me, or keep an eye on the mailing list archive at Namesys.
From what I understand, this patch has been held back from the main reiserfs distrib (and now the kernel proper) because it depends on a feature that is still being debated.
"That's all I have to say about that" --Forrest Gump
Grub - www.gnu.org/software/grub/ - has had support for Reiserfs since mid last year. grub also offers a lot of other goodies over and above LILO
"Linux users never complain about Microsoft. They don't need to!"
Entered UC Berkeley after completing the eighth grade, received a BA in Systematizing, which was an individual major.
Whoa! Entered UC Berkeley after 8th grade! I think we have the next Einstein on our hands.Daniel
Take a look at
l _you_need_to_know_about-Filesystems.pdf
http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/articles/issue6/lu6-Al
I read the hard copy version, which gave a very good rundown of the available filesystems. Hope this helps
Eliminate any spaces you see in the following URL:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l= reiserfs&m=97965219413577&w=2
Because you always backup your data. For example what if the hd goes tits up in the middle of the conversion? What if you lose power in the middle? All kinds of things that could go wrong in the middle of the conversion that could cause data loss. But of course you already have full backups of all your data because any of those other things could go wrong at any moment in the day. Don't you? You mean you don't? Maybe you should learn about doing backups before you start play with a new filesystem. :) Have a paranoid day.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
If you look at the section on Reiserfs at
l _you_need_to_know_about-Filesystems.pdf
http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/articles/issue6/lu6-Al
It suggests that Reiserfs is not (yet) a true Journalling file system. Here's what it says:
Reiserfs uses a scheme called 'preserve lists' to update metadata, ensuring that metadata isn't overwritten directly - this reduces the risk of inconsistencies occuring in event of a crash. (Reiserfs isn't a true Journalling filesystem, although journalling extrnsions have been pre-announced.)
what say ye?
Yeah, I tried ReiserFS with woody back at kernel 2.4.0-test12. It's fast, and doesn't complain after lock-up. It all was working great until it locked up while playing quake3 a couple of times . . . then it started complaining about a couple of files that were corrupted or something. I didn't lose much, but I switched back to ext2 right away . . .
This bug has been fixed.
x xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx': File name too long
I've you actually followed reiserfs development any you would know this. The issue was the fact that reiserfs knows how to handle filenames longer that 255, but the VFS in the linux kernel does not. So, reiserfs that is in 2.4.1-pre7 limits this to 255 characters..
As proof for you tiny little mind...
mkdir "$(perl -e 'print "x" x 768')"
mkdir: cannot create directory `xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The said filesystem is reiserfs..
The ads got killed on inclusion to 2.4.1-preX
So don't worry about the ads anymore..
Specifically, read the partition howto, the man pages for fdisk, and the lilo/grub man/info pages. A good documentation reference point for Linux in general (including links to all the HOWTOs, etc. is the Linux Documentaiton Project.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Does anybody know of any small Distributions (like Peanut) that will natively mount the Reiser File system? I know of several people that have had trouble mounting their file sysems (writable) after screwing up key files.
I'm hesitating a switch to Reiser because I don't know what supports it yet. (i.e. Partition Magic, Sys Comm. 2000, emergency boot disks, etc.)
That WAS pretty funny...
(In case you haven't seen the ads for Reisen chocolate caramel somethingorothers, the tag-line is "Mighty chocolaty, mighty Reisen. You've GOT to try one!")
...so where can I find more info on ResierFS?
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
You don't seem to hear much about the other journalling filesystems, most notably JFS and ext3. I would really like to see an article comparing the different filesystems ... including a walkthrough of patching the kernel, making the filesystem, etc ... perhaps I'll do one up this weekend.
RFC2119
The topic is that of ReiserFS finally being included in the official, stable kernel, and chrisdb is curious as to wether it is as stable as the rest of the kernel, or still marked experimental...
© 2000 Ilmari. All ritghts reserved, all wrongs reversed
© ilmari. All rights reserved, all wrongs reversed
In a nutshell: it rocks
And not having to fsck a 15 Gig partition every umpteenth time saves a lot of time and nerves (have you noticed, that this always happens when when you're in a hurry ?)
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Thank you.
A little defensive, yes? :)
This isn't bad.
A new release gets a new bright shinny clean slate. It'll save time in trying to sort out all the patches that have been developed.
Get everything prioritized:
What patches fix immediate bugs in the current code that need to be fixed. The really apperent things, like buffer overflows.
What are deficiencies in the code to make it useful? Things like "I brought the can of soup, but forgot the can opener"
What is actually dev? "The stove works fine, we can get a microwave later"
Over time, I'd imagine there have been a large number of patches submitted. Several of those probably have several versions submitted, if people have been keeping up with code changes in their patches. So which version to use? Instead of trying to manage all the patches, delare the kernel version that all patches must work with, then use them. That gives you a level field to work with for all the patches and a place to start looking at including and excluding patches into the release and placing into the Dev area.
This might piss people off, but these are most likely folks that are thinking of just thier patches and not of the kernel as a whole and users in general.
Linus is doing the smart thing to maintain the kernel in a very good manner.
I congratulate him and hope he keeps up the good work.
I am pretty sure Hans Reiser named his filesystem after himself (spelt 'Reiser') and not after a slightly-typo'ed variation of it (Resier).
Loadsa bucks spent by Andover, even more spent by VA, and we still have typo fever all over Slashdot!!
KEEP IT UP! :-)
"Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting wuntime ewwors!" - Elmer Fudd
"Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting wuntime ewwors!" - Elmer Fudd
Sort of.
Bizarrely enough, a whole new filesystem doesn't count as 'infrastructure' in the sense of the kernel. If I've got the right end of the stick, each file system interfaces to the rest of the kernel through the VFS (well pretty much) so that no 'core' kernel changes when you add a new filesystem. (There are probably plenty of exceptions to this).
[This is one example of what people mean when they say that the kernel *is* object-oriented whenever people suggest coding it in C++.]
I am using reiser at work (and quite like it for some things), but have recently begun experimenting with SGI's xfs filesystem as well, and must say that thus far I am very, very impressed.
So impressed that, at home, I have migrated from reiserfs (the reiser 2.4.0 patch and the XFS cvs tree wouldn't coexist, though that will probably change now that reiser is in the official tree). For the video editing I'm doing XFS works very well, and the scalability is astounding!
The only thing that worries me is that SGI has commented that they "won't support competing standards" (paraphrased) if the community chooses something other than their work. While I applaud this stance in principle, I think for filesystems it is very misguided. Linux is designed to support a choice of many filesystem types, and it would be very unfortunate indeed if XFS were not among those choices. Reiser is great, ext3, JFS, etc. are probably fine, and XFS (even in beta form) is just plain awesome.
If anyone from SGI should be reading this, I hope you will not construe the inclusion of reiserfs in the official kernel tree to mean the community "has decided" on a standard, and that even if the community had, that work on XFS will continue. Hopefully, when it comes to chocies like which filesystem one prefers, there will never be a "standard," but rather a standard set of choices which will include ext2, xfs, reiser, and perhaps in the not too distant future one or two encrypted filesystems as well.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Here is a pretty good howto for moving your root partition to ReiserFS. I used it a while ago, and haven't had any problems since then. ReiserFS seems to run a little faster, and the short fsck times are definetly nice. http://kurt.andover.net/Reiser-filesystem-HOWTO.ht ml
While adding a new fs is not an infrastructure change, adding a whole other breed of file systems, journalling filesystems, was. Changes to the VFS were required and I think old filesystems had to be modified a bit to adapt to them at one point. This took place a while ago though. Adding reiserfs to 2.4.1 won't cause additional changes in the VFS layer and neither should the addition of ext3, XFS, and all the rest.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I have used reiserfs successfully with both grub and lilo, running Mandrake 7.2.
As an aside, I have also used SGI's XFS (downloaded from cvs) successfully with lilo. Grub doesn't seem to like 2.4.0 at all with any filesystem type (the hang happens at the start of the kernel unpacking process and may be filesystem independent, but in any event ext2 and reiser fail equally), so I dumped it in favor of lilo for the time being and thus haven't tested it with XFS.
In short, in my experience either journalling filesystem works fine with lilo.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I hate to be the voice that doesn't sing along the choir lines, but I have to report problems with ReiserFS.
:-).
It was an SMP system (my corporate web-proxy), running ReiserFS on 2.2.1X, with 5 x 9 Gb disks
It rocked - until it stopped working at all. There was some race which locked the CPUs after at most one day of uptime. Granted, the box is plenty loaded, at the time was pretty low on RAM, etc etc etc.
Still, I had to revert to ext2 and it's been running perfectly since.
On the good side, I haven't had any problem on UP boxes or not-so-loaded systems (probably they just couldn't gather enough load to trigger the bug
So I really hope that the problems are fixed, and that ReiserFS (possibly along with its "raw" variant, which has great promise for web-caches and news-servers) will be mainstream soon.
Does anyone use reiser in combination with NFS? I have been for some time and (depending on the kernel version) get bad inodes (the file can't be read/stated). Anyone had the same problem (The problem is trivial to reproced and I've been surprised that more people haven't reported it).
I used 2.4.0-test8 for some time on my home NFS server (40gigs). Occationally, I'd get:
Dec 18 09:38:18 zdd kernel: vs-13048: eiserfs_iget: bad_inode. Stat data of (59369205036) not found
With 2.4.0, I got so many of these that I had to back out.
It's a neat tool, very useful indeed. The trouble I see, is that it won't make it into distributions soon. For Linux to be Out There, it has to be on the shelf/downloadable. For about 90% of the users, if it doesn't come on the RH/Slack/Mandrake/etc. CD, it doesn't exist.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Besides not having to go through a fsck everytime a system crashes, what other features will we get with this ReiserFS? Will we still be restricted to that "32,000 subdirectories" limit?
on 80min cd's (700mb) thats 114 cd's = $125 for good quality BASF cd's.
on a 4x (most common burner) taking 20min for each 80min cd, + 2 min for swapping/labeling/etc that s 2508 minutes, also known as 41 hours, where you cant sleep.
Hows that for backing up? I think not!
"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk ?"
stuff
Well, you could use the mirroring and parity features of RAID, since hard disks tend to be cheaper than the media that can be used to back them up. (like the big ass super gig tape drives)
Well, let's see. Did you even try this before you posted? I just ran that command on my ReiserFS partition, and it executed in under half a secong with no problems. They fixed this one already boys and girls!!!
Deven Phillips, CISSP
Network Architect
Viata Online, Inc.
Wherever you go, there I am...
One of those "last resort" tools (reiserfsck --rebuild-tree) bit me as I tried to mend the polluted partition on the woody SMP box.
To make a long story short, I lost the files on the partition (Let's hear it for backups! Especially since I also got bit by having my "quickie" backup tarball be unreadable since it was 4GB in size. :-)
We've now migrated data from all of our 2.4.0-and-reiserfs partitions back to ext2.
"Proceed, with fingers crossed."
(BTW, I *did* recommend you not try this without backups, didn't I :-)
There's a vulnerability in Linux with long directory names that's exposed by ReiserFS. As best as they can tell, the vulnerability is in the Linux VFS layer, and not ReiserFS itself. See this page and this page for more details.
As for whether this makes the FS marked experimental or stable, I don't know. I'd imagine that it'll be marked experimental simply because this is the first mainline release to include it.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
What prevented me to convert the desktop machine is the backup all your data bit, before conversion which is claimed not to provide any problems.
But then why should I backup my data ?
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk