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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?"
There have been too many reports in the last couple of months of people whose machines have lost power, and booted up, only to find that every file on their XFS filesystems has been filled with zeroes.
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.
It's interesting that you mention that. Some time ago, I used ReiserFS as the filesystem on my laptop computer (I only have one partition, not counting swap). The performance was alright and it always took some seconds to mount the partition (this is a known thing for ReiserFS). So, more or less, my experience had been fine. One day, I was trying to view one JPG file and the program was unable to open it, so I wondered why. After examining the file, I found out that while the file size was alright, its contents were all binary zeros. I discovered similar things for a handful of files in my system, many of them in my home directory, I supposed because that's where the biggest part of the disk data is located and if a problem arose, it's probably going to be there.
At the beginning I suspected something had gone wrong while copying the data to an external USB hard drive and back to the newly formatted ReiserFS partition. But, some weeks later, I discovered a similar situation in a file I had created recently (after the data move), and that had been available there for many days. I am only a desktop user and I lack evidence on what caused this, but I tested my harddrive to see if it had bad sectors or behaved poorly for some reason, and nothing turned up. I fsck'ed the partition and everything was alright. I suspected this problem was due to ReiserFS, so I took the decision of switching back to ext3 with dir_index activated, and the problem hasn't reappeared again. I suspect I hit a bug in the ReiserFS code, and I lost my data in one or several of those ocasions when I left my laptop alone for some time and it powered off suddenly when it ran out of battery. This happened more times since the switch to ext3, but I haven't lost any more files since then.
I know this can be a particular case which may not represent the behaviour of ReiserFS, but as I read your comment I thought I had to share my experience too.
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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