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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?"
why not move to xfs? it's a very good performance file system. unless there a rumours of the author being a murderer of course.
Why UNIX?
At least that's what happens to a sinking ship. A maintainer going missing does not quite instill the users with confidence, especially when it is happening due to reasons other than flagging interest. Most commercial distributions have SLAs which sort of work against such brilliant work by an individual contributor - they just can't depend on the whims of a person or his fate.
One of my friends once told me that "Extraordinary hackers are people with socially acceptable problems". In fact to achieve what they feel they must, a lot of them give up a lot - health, social lives and financial security. But because a few do that, does not mean FOSS programmers are crackpots. And I say this as a son who's home (which I can because my commits go to a public CVS) watching over a sick father.
So as understandable as it is that commercial vendors might want to switch away, but that doesn't mean anyone gets to shine a torch or make jokes into somebody else's darkness.
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it claims ext3 is more stable and will 'soon' match performance with the newer ReiserFS 4
ext3 will match reiserfs4? how? when? are they talking about ext4?
it claims ext3 is more stable and will 'soon' match performance with the newer ReiserFS 4.
Gee, ext3 must've matured a lot in the past few years. I stopped using extX filesystems long ago because they lost files after power cuts waay too easily. ( I could bork an old RedHat install simply by pulling the plug/rebooting several times ). Moved to reiser then xfs and barely lost anything if I had to force a reboot.
Perhaps. But the single most valuable thing about both Reiser filesystems is how well they handle large numbers of small files. I hate Berkeley DB and its ilk with a passion. They take all kinds of valuable data that should be addressable with standard tools and obscure it in some weird format that I can't make any sense of without some specialized set of tools. Not only that, but they're slow!
I want to stop using these awful things. I want to use a hierarchical naming scheme to address the individual bits of data I'm stuffing into the filesystem without having to resort to stupid tricks with splitting up the name so I don't have anymore than 256 entries per directory.
None of the filesystems made for Linux aside from ReiserFS seem to even acknolwedge that this problem is worth solving. Personally, I think it is a major, short-sighted bellybutton gazing failure. The excuse seems to be "Well, you're using the filesystem in a strange way that nobody uses it in, so stop doing that!". But that's a completely circular argument. I simply do not WANT to contort my programs in such a ridiculous way to accomodate the failings of filesystem designs.
ReiserFS is fast and flexible. I've never had any data loss with 3. At least, not in the last 3 years or so. And I have a machine that will (for reasons of a bad motherboard) randomly lock up if I'm using both the disk and the Ethernet card heavily.
I don't really care that much about plug-ins. They're kind of a neat idea for having super-efficient storage for caches and stuff, but really I just want to be able to independently address millions of small pieces of data and have it be reasonably efficient.
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That has been annoying me for years.
Well, I suppose I have to admit a touch of amusement... I can point at it and say that computer people are dumb.
But overall, annoyance.
Did Novell ever get around to porting Novell Storage Services [NSS] to Linux?
NSS was the B-Tree successor to the old allocation table NetWare file system, and it had all the permissions and attributes that were unique to the Novell World:
So did Novell ever get around to porting an R/W/C/E/M/FS/AC/S file system to Linux, to be used in place of the standard Unix RWX/RWX/RWX file system?
And if so, is anyone out there using it?
ReiserFS is touted to be a zero-slack filesystem, whereas ext3 still ties up entire blocks (groups of sectors, usually 4K, 8K, 16K depending on formatting options) on, say, a 1k text file, or a file which spills over into a tiny fraction of another block. When you have thousands of files which take up only a portion of a block, resulted in a lot of wasted space (how many files are exact multiples of the block size?). Some may argue "yeah, but disk space is cheap" but even so, 750GB drives are the largest we can buy now (yeah I know, RAIDs, but the point still remains), and if you fill it up doing projects and need just 80MB additional space to complete a job, a 300MB of allocated space is unused portions of blocks (slack), it sucks knowing that you could have finished a job if the filesystem weren't so inefficient.
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This simply won't happen. There are lots of choices in filesystem development, and if your application doesn't match the choices that were made, then that filesystem won't be best, or "match" the specialist that did make matching choices.
There is no way that Extn will ever match, for example, ReiserFS' performance on working with a directory full of ten thousand 700-byte-long files. ReiserFS will do directory-related things faster, and tail-compression will save you space (and therefore give you even more performance, thanks to caching).
I don't have a problem with SUSE picking something else, though, because my whole point is that, no matter what FS you pick, if the default configuration is that the installer just formats the whole disk as one filesystem, then no filesystem is going to be ideal in all cases.
Of course, the Gentoo Ricer approach is to break your disk array up into little pieces, so you're using performance-over-safety filesystems on the RAID0 parts, using safety-over-performance filesystems on the RAID1 and RAID10 parts, and compromise filesystems on the RAID5 parts -- and within each group there is a variety of different formatting and mounting options used. (Not to mention a little tmpfs here and there; not everything has to survive a reboot.) Yeah, df lists 20 different mountpoints, every part of the hierarchy "optimized" (*cough*) for what it gets used for.
Now I just need some good-looking stickers to put on the outside of the case, and it'll be even faster! Yeah, next weekend I'll probably spend a few more hours changing something, but for the next 5 days I'll be pretty smug about every millisecond I save.
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I tag every single story I see like this "dontaskquestions". Do the same and pass it on.
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