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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?"
What implications will this have for SuSE users
Well, just a guess . . . but they might have to use a new filesystem!
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
"Rats are the first to desert a sinking ship"?
I think is to have a poll as to measure people's opinions
about the guy's innocence. With options such as
1. He is innocent
2. He is guilty
3. Cowboyneal did it etc..
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
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?
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.
Regards,
--
*Art
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.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
It's also interesting how people now explain the blood on Reiser's shirt in this comic, while this comic also predates this whole arrest story.
4. The bitch set me up (Marion Barry)
5. The glove's too tight (OJ)
6. Is that Chewbacca here? (Chewbacca defense)
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.
Several commenters appear to think that this is due to the arrest of Hans, In fact it was announced over a month ago, before any of the stories about Hans broke. The original announcement is from the 14th september http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2006-09 /msg00542.html
When it comes to performance between the filesystems (reiser vs. ext3 vs. xfs) then I don't have much to comment, but with regards to security... I've used reiser for quite some time but in the end threw it away because it just couldn't cope with what I wanted..
/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...
Last but not least; crash recovery. I know, this is threading on thin ice since these results cannot be reproduced perse but the whole nature of reiser makes it good and bad for workstations (like SuSE). 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. 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.
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
Eventually I moved to XFS myself and never bothered looking back. Its not perfect, absolutely not since on XFS you too can experience situations like I just described. But in that same environment where I sometimes had to endure a powerloss I noticed that the frequency in which my data became corrupt was far and far less than with reiser. So my conclusion: reiser isn't the best when it comes to keeping your data safe. Its also a conclusion which has been backed up by other people who experiences the same problems in a more or lesser degree.
So my comment: finally Novell is coming to its senses. IMO they should have done this years ago, either going to XFS (my favorite) or ext3 where the latter is ofcourse the most logical choice considering how this evolved from ext2 (which, strangely enough, used to be the default on SuSE. I never did understand why they'd move away from it).
Geez, now blood's found in his car, and with the passenger seat missing, history of abuse, guy is arrested with $8,900 and his passport on him...
/dev/hda3 on / type reiserfs (rw)
If he were a famous football player, he'd have a chance, but I don't think a filesystem developer can muster up a "dream team".
I expect other distros will knee-jerk too.
$ mount
Crime does not pay!
Ok, ReiserFS might be a bit on the slow and unstable side, but I would not actually call it a crime.
Come on now, just cause someones charged with murder, should that really stop the progress of technology? I can see changing the name if he's convicted, but what happened to innocent until proven guilty...
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.
``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.
Not that I've got my finger right on the pulse of FS development, but I find it hard to believe that ext3 is soon going to equal Reiserfs for all cases. Perhaps for a typical case, but ReiserFS was supposed to allow a lot of stuff that was not feasible with ext3 like efficiently having really small files, using the FS as a database, and a lot of other potentially groundbreaking research and abilities. I hope none of the good ideas get lost.
Yes, in fact someone made a command to do just that: `cp`
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.
Apparently it is to be called "icefs" in Etch.
Something to do with Hans not being available to QA patches by the Debian kernel team.
That does seem a little unlikely. Isn't ext3 still basically ext2 with journaling? How are they still making such progress with it that performance will soon match a modern filesystem like Reiser4, which among other things has a more optimized disk layout and will have transparent compression? If there are patches to bring those to ext3, they're neither stable nor ext2 compatible, which are supposed to be ext3's advantage.
(Meh. Upon RTFA'ing I see what they meant was that ext3 will "soon" match the performance of ReiserFS (3), and that it is still more stable than Reiser4. The summary still deserves the rant, and I'm actually curious about how they are improving performance in ext3 nowadays, so I'm still posting this.)
In a fair world, refrigerators would make electricity.
So exchanging reiserfs for ext3 is a downgrade now? With ext3 you get a stable well-maintained file-system used by the majority of linux users worldwide. With reiserfs you get a poorly maintained file-system, which the original creator has dropped to work on something else, and that nobody else maintains, and that instead of trying to do well as a file-system focuses on performance for other random things, such as being a database, having small files, etc... Maybe you find it sad, I call it common sense!
I wonder if Reiser 4 "file" system is hidden inside of a cake.
Are you kidding - this stuff practically writes itself.
Umm, whatever ever happened to innocent until proven guilty? I agree there may be a good chance Reiser did it, but I think there's also reasonable doubt he didn't.
I wrote the original email proposing that SUSE switch from reiserfs to ext3. At the risk of triggering responses of "The lady doth protest too much," I'll restate a few statements I've made elsewhere in response to common questions:
t ching-reiserfs-as-it-default-fs/#comment-28534
1) The decision has *nothing* to do with Hans' situation. The email was released on the same day as the initial story broke, but it was pointed out to me after I had sent the email. I was concerned then, correctly as it turns out, that people would consider the two issues intertwined. They're not. My proposal was based on technical and maintainability reasons alone. The timing is an extremely unfortunate coincidence.
2) SUSE is *not* dropping reiser3 support. This change only affects the default. It doesn't change our support of reiser3 at all. We still support four major file systems: ext3, reiserfs, xfs, and ocfs2. Our installer offers other file systems as well as a convenience, and users are free to use any of them. So, if you're committed to reiser3 or xfs, nothing is stopping you from continuing to deploy systems using them.
3) Many benchmarks show reiser3 as performing better than ext3, and this is mostly true. What isn't shown in those benchmarks is that if you're operating two or more reiser3 file systems in parallel, performance will degrade for both of them due to the use of BKL everywhere. ext3 (and other file systems) will don't degrade in that case. I've also read reports that there is a bit of research going on into making ext3 locking finer grained. I don't have any sources to cite, but any reduction of critical sections without reducing reliability is always a good thing.
People refer to reiser3 as a modern file system, but I'd call it progressive. Reiser3 has served us well for years, but it's showing its age. The basic idea behind reiser3 is still sound, and when extended with integrated integrity checking and better b-tree locking borrowed from years of database research, it would perform extremely well. The problem is that adding the first is a huge disk format change, which means it's no longer reiser3. Adding the second is a hugely invasive change that would throw out a good chunk of the existing code -- again, essentially creating a new file system. It would be like people saying, "I like my ext3 file system, but I don't like the code. Let's start over." Combined with a small development community, it's a recipe for instability and there are more interesting problems out there.
I've posted some more lengthy comments here: http://linux.wordpress.com/2006/09/27/suse-102-di
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?
I'm tired of this crap. I have a feeling that editors just feel that they have to add something to submissions, so they add in "what do yall think???" at the end.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
Its the same deal with Sun's current development ZFS: it lacks the option to decently make a backup.
See Solaris ZFS Administration Guide, Chapter 6 Working With ZFS Snapshots and Clones.
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.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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
I hope he is not guilty; I hope that his wife simply tried to pull a scam and is actually OK and is found hiding in Russia or somewhere. Even though it'd have been a scummy thing for her to do, at least their kids would not have lost their mother. That's the single worst part of the whole thing -- oh wait, am I saying "think of the children?" Shoot me now, please!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Thinking of the children is not a bad thing here.
I also hope she isn't dead and that his name is cleared, but if he did it, I hope they find evidence and that they convict him.
I'm not ruling out any possibilities.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
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.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
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.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Late last year I was researching Reiserfs and Ext3 to see which would be best suited for my new server.
Resierfs looked like the clear winner for two good reasons:
1. Reiserfs is faster. Much faster than ext3 in nearly every scenario. Large files and small files.
2. No inode problems. If your users fill your HD with hundreds of thousands of tiny files you're not going to run out of inodes before you run out of disk space. This is something that needs to be anticipated (at the cost of more disk space) at filesystem creation time in ext3.
Reliability for both filesystems was pretty much the same from all accounts.
But in the end I went with ext3 for one and only one reason: Recoverability.
Reiserfs had no, or very few decent, recovery utilities. If a filesystem corruption occurred (and it seemed that the probablity of such corruptions was equal for both filesystems), then data on an ext3 fs stands a much better chance of being recovered than on a reiserfs one.
Of course that was late 2005; that situation may have changed by now.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife