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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.

2 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!