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Ask ReiserFS Project Leader Hans Reiser

Posted by Roblimo on from the not-the-kind-of-journal-you-keep-on-Slashdot dept.

Hans Reiser leads a successful Free Software project that has attracted plenty of attention, many users, and even that Holy Grail of so many who have started their own Free or Open Source projects: Big-time funding from DARPA, SuSE, and others. How did he do it? What's his advice for other project leaders? Ask him! And ask him any other question you have in mind. Please stick to one question per post, and avoid questions that can be answered with a few minutes' worth of research. We'll publish Mr. Reiser's answers as soon as he gets them back to us.

5 of 343 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What is the future of ReiserFS... by arth1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    ReiserFS main competitor isn't really EXT3.
    EXT3 is a journaling addition to EXT2, and much more interesting for people who want to change their existing file systems instead of creating new file systems. Note that EXT3 is slower than both ReiserFS and EXT2, but it does have journaling, and provides faster reboots :-)

    The main competitor for performance is SGI's excellent XFS. The latest implementations are quite solid, and the performance likewise are excellent. Even compared to ReiserFS.
    Both ReiserFS and XFS suffer from the potential of data loss on system failures, and XFS probably more so than ReiserFS, as tiny files might not be committed at all. However, for RAID users, I can not see any reason to use ReiserFS instead of XFS, and definitely not EXT3 unless upgrading the file system.

    Regards,
    --
    Arthur Hagen

  2. Re:ReiserFS and laptops by Lukey+Boy · · Score: 5, Informative
    I had the same problem. Disable access time in your fstab file and the drive will not be so frequent - apparently ReiserFS spools and flushes the atime data, keeping everything spun up. Make a line in fstab like this:

    /dev/hda5 / reiserfs noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1

    In fact, I disable access time tracking on every box I work with. I haven't found a worthwhile reason to ever enable it. And that's my 2 cents!

  3. Re:ReiserFS and laptops by arth1 · · Score: 3, Informative

    atime can be quite useful for caches, like client and proxy web caches and man page caches. It's also used for other services that expire data based on access time, like usenet leaf servers, and log rotating programs.

    Before turning off atime, I advise that an effort is made to identify what data really needs atime, and if possible create separate partitions for those, with atime enabled.

    Regards,
    --
    *Art

  4. Re:ReiserFS and laptops by Utoxin · · Score: 3, Informative

    atime is necessary for one major component of a lot of websites: The PHP Session files.

    The default PHP session handler uses the atime of the files to expire them properly. If they don't have atime, they get expired prematurely. (I think... It's been a while since I made the mistake of noatime on the partition that holds the session files.)

    My solution to this is to use noatime everywhere except the /tmp partition. I also use notail on the /tmp partition, and anywhere that has frequent file IO.

    --
    Matthew Walker
    http://www.tweeterdiet.com/ - My Diet Tracking Tool
  5. Re:What is the future of ReiserFS... by GrenDel+Fuego · · Score: 3, Informative

    Even though ext3 is a journaling filesystem, it still does a lengthy (and annoying) filesystem check every 20 mounts or so. To its credit it has never found an error, but still. I thought getting rid of that stuff was why we wanted journaling filesystems.

    I personally think that the occasional check is probably a good idea, but if it annoys you then you can always change the interval, or even disable it.

    Just use "tune2fs -c <how many mounts> /dev/PARTITIONNAME"

    -c 0 should cause it to not use that functionality.