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Rewritten ReiserFS 4 Promises 2-5x Speed Increase
An anonymous reader reports that version 4 of "ReiserFS will be released in first quarter. Complete rewrite will support Atomic writing. 2-5 times faster. File corruption will be a thing of the past. Lindows.com is paying for part of it."
I cant say I would ever run Lindows, but it definately raises my impression of them that they are continuing to support reiserfs.
This is an example of how a corporation can benifit from OSS and share that benifit by contributing back to OSS developers.
The Ro Factor - Jeep/Linux Weblog
Distros don't offer it during installation for a few usual reasons:
1) no mainline kernel acceptance
2) known data corruption issues
3) Hans Reiser himself has said they're beta and not quite production yet, but will be soon
Agreed. I use reiserfs on all my Slackware boxen, have for a while now. (Slackware does offer reiserfs during install.)
So will reiserfs 4 require a 2.6 kernel, or will those of us using 2.4 be able to use it? Also, does it require a re-format, or can you upgrade a v3 FS to v4?
Ron Paul 2012
Or if that is too much to digest, I wrote a fairly easy to follow summary on kuro5hin.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
I'm glad to see this. I remember when Lindows was announced, the general reaction here was, "Why create something to emulate Windows?" and there was a level of contempt here because it was so easy to use (as there always is here -- almost like a reaction of people insecure with their own status).
They're also sponsoring a project involving KDE (forgot exactly what) and NVu (a full WYSIWYG HTML/Site editor based on Mozilla for Linux). Lindows is an excellent example of good citizenship in the FLOSS world. It's true they are a pay-for-only distro, but they are definitely giving back to the community -- in ways the community needs and other people/companies are not supporting.
Yes-- this is far too late to save ReiserFS on my installation. I moved all our disks to ext3 a few months ago after experiencing extensive file corruption. A scsi disk went bad. When it went down, all files that had been active at the time were corrupted. Mostly that was several dozen mail spool files. Didn't I switch to a journaled file system in part to avoid this sort of thing? Grrrrrrrrrr.
Both ext3 and reiser3 offer(ed) data journaling, which would help with that kind of thing. Neither of them would even try to provide any better protection against corruption than if the application program(s) crashed. If a drive failed while applications were writing to files, the files might be current as of the most recent completed system call (write() or whatever), but even then, they could be "corrupt" in the sense that not all the operations in a sequence had completed; I do not think even reiser4 offers that level of transactional support-- I guess maybe it could have some sort of open()...close() atomicity thing, which would be nice.
Larry
Ext3 in its default mode also does metadata journaling only, but it always writes the data blocks first (at some performance hit), so such lossage won't occur.
In theory, you may lose data badly during a power failure on a non-journaling filesystem such as ext2, since the filesystem itself may be badly broken. However, this does not occur often in practice.
In short, reiser3 is probably not the data-eating monster in normal operating conditions, nor will the filesystem become corrupted in case of a power failure, but newly rewritten data can get lost (including the older versions) during a crash or power failure, so it is probably safer to use ext3 for now if you don't have a UPS. Also, if your disk fails, all bets are off --- expect to lose some data, no matter how advanced your filesystem is (unless it is designed to operate on faulty hardware).
BTW, I dumped reiserfs on my disk (on my home machine) during a disk failure because it doesn't have the feature to mark blocks as "bad". Quite a few blocks on my disk mysterically went bad, and for some reason it was not corrected by the hard drive.
Complete rewrite will support Atomic writing, 2-5 times faster File corruption
Eek! Thankfully on re-reading, I saw that "Complete rewrite will support Atomic writing *and* 2-5 times faster *and* File corruption will be a thing of the past" :-)
Sounds better than naming your daughther ext3 (or FAT32!), at least...
My website
For a quick explanation, WinFS is a FS on top of SQL Server (a dbms). It will allow stored procedures to be invoked, just like a dbms and is now updatedable remotely.
ReiserFS is still a journalFS that is similar in nature to an Apple fork (ability to store keyword/values for attributes). It has procuderes that can be invoked based on read, write, readdir, writedir, open, and close. Security is still handled normal, so only those with permission can change the functions.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Stored procedures in your filesystem? Um. Yeah, I trust Microsoft to make this secure and reliable.
I do.
Really.
OK, I'm lying.
It's nice to see that Microsoft is planning to support a whole new class of viruses.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Everything I read about WinFS sounds like a blatant rip-off of BeFS (The BeOS's filesystem)'s featureset.
BeFS was database-driven and had all kinds of great querying features, could support files of over a petabyte (I forget exactly how big that is), had fixed-size blocks rather than a fixed-count, and I believe it was journaled, too. That was back, when? 1995? 1996?
I bet M$ is glad Be went down, now they don't have to worry about infringing on patents (if BeFS WAS, in fact, patented). Or does Palm own that, now? Or whoever bought all their IP.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
I was a little unclear. The kernel crashed because of the bad disk. After replacing the disk, rebooting, and replaying the journals, we found Reiser had corrupted data on other, still-good disks. I would certainly expect to lose data that had been scheduled to be written at the time of the crash. I did not expect to have files on good disks essentially shuffled up with each other, which was the form of the data corruption.
File and filesystem corruption is never a thing of the past. You can mitigate their effects, but no amount of filesystem robustness will fully protect you against failing hardware. Please don't make false advertisements regarding F[L]OSS projects.
The 'atomic update' quality is something MySQL and PostgreSQL can take advantage of, or in fact any lication that often writes small amounts of data and calls fsync/fdatasnc. And it shouldn't be terribly difficult to make the required changed. Kudos!
Mostly that was several dozen mail spool files. Didn't I switch to a journaled file system in part to avoid this sort of thing? Grrrrrrrrrr.
>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;
No you didn't. Usually journaled file systems only protect metadata integrity. So files will get corrupt, but entire directory trees will never suddenly dissapear. This is true of all journaled filesystems, even high-end ones like VxFS or XFS. Some filesystems (like ext3 and reiserfs) offer data journaling in addition to regular journaling, but at a significant speed hit. Data journaling is usually disabled by default, except in ext3.
The new Reiser4 will support atomic file operations naturally, at the full speed of the filesystem. As a result, you can get the benifets of data journaling without the performance hit.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
"We supported ReiserFS at MP3.com..." -Michael Robertson
Are there other familiar places that use(d) ReiserFS?
By the way, great tag at the bottom of the article:
"Copyright (C) 2004 Lindows.com, Inc. All rights reserved.
Lindows.com is not endorsed by or affiliated with Microsoft Corporation in any way - in fact, we don't even really like them because they are suing us.
Yeah, probably a little more than an AC post on
Personally, I've used ReiserFS exclusively since it first became available (and supported) with SuSE, which was few years ago, and I haven't experienced any problems with it. In fact, I was able to successfully save my data even when my IBM DeskStar (aka "Deathstar") HD started going bad - didn't lose anything.
ReiserFS is good because it uses advanced algorithms and such that I will never understand to increase the speed at which harddrives (or usb solid state devices...) can read and write data at the cost of processor utilization. This is good because
A) Processors have been increasing in speed much more quickly than hard-drives, so this tradeoff can lead to a more balanced system.
B) Hard-drive read/write speeds can have a lot more impact on the speed of a computer than people realize. When large programs (Open Office, etc.) take a long time to load up it makes a computer seem slow, and the general mentality is that the solution to a slow computer is to get a faster processor. Sometimes when I'm booted in Windows XP i'll be running a lot of programs simultaniously and the computer will seriuously bog down, so I'll three finger salute and look at my running processes, only to find that my cpu is idle. I'll then look over to see my HD activity LED constantly lit.
On the other hand, one of the Cons of using ReiserFS is that it eats up CPU cycles. It probably doesn't make sense to use it on an older (Pentium I/II) computer because the gain in Hard Drive speed will be overshadowed by the lost processor cycles, although 2.6's new kernel pre-empting code would probably help a lot with this problem.
There are also reports of file corruption, so it might not be a good idea on a server that can't afford down time to restore a backup.
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
i use it on production machines, never had a problem. one of those machines it curently over 400 days uptime, and it does 10,000's of file copies everyday. most of my other machines are between 200 - 365 days up time as well, again never had a problem and this is on 2nd hand hardware. kind of speaks for itself really.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....