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Novell Moves Away From ReiserFS
VSquared56 writes, "Novell announced a shift in the default filesystem from ReiserFS to ext3 for users of its SuSE Enterprise Linux. This news comes shortly after Hans Reiser's arrest, though Novell says the decision was being considered long before. Though Novell will continue supporting ReiserFS 3, it claims ext3 is more stable and will 'soon' match performance with the newer ReiserFS 4. What implications will this have for SuSE users, and ReiserFS's future as a whole?"
This was modded flamebait.
People, you might not want to hear it, and you might not agree with stupid knee-jerk reactions, but these reactions will be coming. The name "reiserfs" is tainted, whether that's rational or not.
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Unfortunately, I hate to agree with you, but it's true. If they project renames and then it continues, it might get picked up again.
The other concern is going to be about support, if Hans is found guilty or not, it doesn't really matter. A company such as Novell may consider that the filesystem platform isn't as supported as what it once was and is moving away from it.
From a marketing point of view, Novell won't want to associated with it either. If they show support for him, and he is found guilty, it's a marketing nightmare for Novell.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
It seems that ReiserFS really depends on 1 guy. For any company this is a risk. It sounds reasonable to me to stay away from products and features like that.
``ext3 is more stable and will 'soon' match performance with the newer ReiserFS 4''
Huh? In whose benchmarks? What about space usage? What about plugins for arbitrary attributes?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
That's what backups are for. Seriously, with XFS you run a very real risk of zeroing out a file if the file system isn't shut down properly.
/. would be going crazy about it. It would be more famous than the BSoD.
OMG, are you kidding? If it was NTFS or FAT, people on
Let me start by saying I'm not disagreeing with you, just pointing out that different people may have different experiences (AKA YMMV).
/etc used to become corrupt, binaries started going haywire and the worst part: because the index wasn't affected it was quite hard to detect these bad files.''
``First your average backup. Yes, I'm well aware that you can always tools like tar but really.. Its the same deal with Sun's current development ZFS: it lacks the option to decently make a backup. Yes you can use tar, but I don't consider this decent. I'm talking about tools like backup/restore (ext3) or even native "ports" like xfsdump/xfsrestore. Easy, fast and reliable. Make a whole dump (or increamental), you can then either restore the whole session or use an interactive shell to merely grab the file(s) you're after. Naturally it also supports commandline parameters. And Reiser? IIRC (correct me if I'm wrong please) its even longer around than xfs, and even xfs managed to get me something decent for making backups...''
I believe backup tools that depend on the specifics of filesystems are a bad idea.
When you go looking for filesystem-independent backup tools, I'm sure you'll find plenty (the recent thread here on Slashdot may be a good starting point). I myself keep most of my data in Subversion repositories and databases; backups are made through the appropriate backup tools. Whatever is left on the filesystem is synchronized between a couple of computers using rsync.
``The good part is its speed, the way it caches and writes data in such a way where it tries to store things in one specific part makes it faster. I can't comment if reiser really is faster than others, I never noticed it.''
In the tests I ran, it wiped the floor with ext2 and (OpenBSD) ffs, especially when extracting lots of small files. I have no idea how it compares to more modern filesystems like XFS, ZFS, etc.
``But the bad part is also that if you have a crash on your hands (just turn of your computer right now. No, not a shutdown but keep the powerbutton pressed untill it goes "poof") and reboot chances are very high that you just lost valuable data.''
Although I have lost files on ReiserFS partitions, I've lost way more on ext2 and (especially) HFS+ partitions.
``The theory behind journaling should give you some protection against this, and normally it does, but its my experience that whenever something like this happened on a box which was using reiser I lost just too many files. Several files in
Often when files seem to be missing after a crash, fsck has been able to recover them for me. This goes for ext2, reiserfs, ffs, and hfs+. Reiserfs is the only one of these on which I have never gotten the filesystem so broken it couldn't be fixed anymore.
In case people are wondering where I get my data from: I work with a lot of old hardware which sometimes fails, laptops that run out of battery or are dropped on the floor, accidentally unplugged power cables, and the occasional unclean shutdown.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Editors, if you're the ones doing it, please stop. If submitters are doing it, please edit their submissions. We don't need this Roland Piquipaille/Ric Romero style of foolishness, i.e. "Blah blah has happened to company FOO, what do you all think?" Posting it for discussion on Slashdot IMPLIES you're going to get a million different viewpoints, none of which are really important to the submitter. You'll get the viewpoints anyway, you don't need to "prompt" us for them.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
What good is a UPS going to do in the case the machine powers off because of a problem with the power unit, a motherboard short circuit, and so on? Any filesystem with serious data loss on a power failure is not acceptable, period.
Well, they had to make up a question (no matter how vague) to get this article on slashdot.
What would happen if (god forbid) Linus were in Reiser's place? Would everyone here be distancing themselves from using Linux? Would Novell, IBM, etc. abandon the use of Linux, throwing out the baby with the bathwater?
This is why when the story hit I posed legitimate questions regarding the filesystem's future (and got flamed for it, BTW, here and on linuxquestions); a person's career work should be viewed independently of his or her personal misdeeds. Otherwise, we should abandon electricity and incandescent lights (Edison was a bit of a bastard, and his invention of the electric chair "tainted" AC), jets (Heinkel was a nazi), Mercury and Apollo programs should never have happened (Wernher von Braun, the brain behind those programs, was a nazi, willing or otherwise). There are many, many worthwhile inventions proposed, designed, and/or implemented by evil people, and yet we use them on a daily basis, because regardless of the creators' nature, philosophy, or misdeeds, they have produced some worthwhile things that abandoning them because of the heritage would be somewhere between silly and irresponsible.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Ext3, in contrast, is stable and likely will match ReiserFS's performance advantages "soon."
Rubbish. Ext3 has never been able to match Reiser's performance on small files or in other areas, and the notion that ext3 is going to match it is absurd. Even ext4 is not likely to catch up. A lot of ext developers have bizarre ideas about how their filesystem compares to Reiser, XFS or even JFS in a lot of areas. Ext is simply a stable and solid, but badly evolved, filesystem and it is a filesystem that generates an awful lot of disk activity.
I've been to the namesys website and haven't found anything about the Hans Reiser arrest. If it is more than a one man show, then they should have a prominent statement about their intention to continue development regardless of the outcome. Not seeing something to that effect after this mych time would make me quite nervous if I had a business or product that relied on continued development of the ReiserFS line. Seems as if Namesys is accepting the inevitable demise of the whole organization at this point; I hope that changes.
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Though I have a much better backup system now, I still avoid ext3 at all costs. As careful as I try to be, I know I'll slip up again sometime.
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