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.

Comments

Reiserfs is great.. and a warning...

[benmhall]

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

More info

[autocracy]

First off, the Reiser File System is what we call a journaling file system. That means that as something is about to be written to the disk, another item describing what is about to be done is written to the disk first (the journal). Now, if you system crashes while the journal is being written, that's no big deal for the filesystem: whatever you were going to save/delete just doesn't get done and the computer happily moves on. However, if your computer crashes after the journal has been written and you're saving that special file, the systems looks at the journal on boot and says "oops, this didn't get done - let's throw it out." Obviously you lose your file here, but it's no worse than in a non-journaling system. In one of those you lose your file, corrupt your filesystem, and lose your data anyway.

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!