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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
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" :-)
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.
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