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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.
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.
XFS is high performance especially for large files and multitasked access.
reiserfs (3) is high performance especially for small files and singletasked access.
JFS is also a good journalled file system with many nifty features, although perhaps not as mature as XFS.
Neither X nor J have been accused of murder, to my knowledge.
All hail J.
Regards,
--
*Art
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.
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.
For the record, I was also quite underwhelmed by XFS. The Gentoo people, I think, wrote that XFS is primarily to large files and *only* if you have an UPS (and proper shutdown control). The problem is that it (quite aggressively) cache write-data; I have seen data disappear which was written nearly 2 hours before. I am quite happy with ext3. Reiserfs had a nasty tendency to slowly deteriorate over time, becoming slower and slower.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
``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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yup, no surprise there. XFS caches writes very agressively in ram, around 50MB if not more, for long periods of times. So it "feels" fast but really isn't in some aspects.
So you pop the power off and *wham* bye bye cached data. This is definately not any kind of fun.
XFS was written for environments where the power just dooes not go out -- datacenters, people with a very good UPS etc. I generally recommend XFS for people with lots of large files, but if they don't have a good power backup, I change my mind.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
AFAIK this is a design flaw in XFS
No, this happens because it's the way XFS does journalling.
XFS journalling isn't as good as the one in ext3, from users' POV. Ext3 default journaling mode takes care of the relationship between metadata and the data associated to that metadata (and here let me remember that journalling/softupdates is a way to avoid corruption of the *metadata*, if you lose data because of a power cut that's fine, but it's not fine that the filesystem gets damaged and needs fsck because the metadata got corrupted)
IOW: when ext3 is going to write metadata to the disk, it looks first to the dirty data cached in the memory and writtes the data *before* it writes the metadata.
XFS journaling, in the other hand, does *not* care about writing the data before the metadata. Why? Well, because journalling is about keeping the metadata safe so you don't need fsck. This means that in case of a power cut, XFS may leave the contents of a "file" (metadata) unscycrhonized with its data. Because of that, the metadata may be pointing to random free zone of the disc with confidential information (passwords) which was deleted but it has not been overwritten, so XFS sets it to zero for safety. Ext3, on the other hand, will never left your data "unscychornised" with your metadata. The file may get corrupted because the program that was manipulating it was stopped in the power cut, but the relationship between the data and the metadata is always coherent.
Ext3 journaling mode may be considered an "extra", and it *does* pay a performance disadvantage because of this. If you want ext3 to behave like xfs (and get better performance), mount your fs with the mount option "data=writeback". Reiserfs in the other hand historically had a similar journaling method as XFS (just like JFS), but the suse guys created a journaling mode similar to the default one in ext3 which AFAIK is not enabled by default (at least on mainline) and gets enabled with "data=ordered"
Is the XFS journaling mode worse? Well, for desktop users, who would rather have syncronized their data and their metadata, clearly yes. This is why XFS is just not the best FS for desktops - its a wonderful FS, but just not "optimized" for desktops. NTFS journaling does the same that ext3 does, BTW, and it's for a reason.
I wonder if Reiser 4 "file" system is hidden inside of a cake.
Neither xfs nor jfs partitions can be reduced. This may not be a big deal to compaines who just add disks and expand their partitions, but I know that I lost about two hundred gig worth of data that would probably still be around if I could have reduced my jfs partition. After that I tried to install ReiserFS then Reiser4, and after a little bit of trouble with those, decided I'd use Ext3 because it just works. Even if its performance isn't as great as some other file systems, I don't know too many people who have lost data because of flaws (or "features") of the filesystem.
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Are you kidding - this stuff practically writes itself.
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?
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.
According to an old email from Ts'o, not only they suggest to run XFS with an UPS but SGI hardware was modified to mitigate damages in case of black-out using big capacitors and, at kernel level, was added a power-fail interrupt to Irix. http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Filesystems/reiserfs.htm l
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.
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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
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
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.
If we start buying CDs then the terrorists have already won.
If you don't know what you are doing, you should stick with the default "distro".
And Microsoft recommends NTFS.
Post tenebras lux. Post fenestras tux.
Hans vision (http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html) is about unifying namespaces (fs, database, email, config files, etc.). So I believe his primary objective was to build a file system that performs well under all situations especially those situations where current filesystems perform so bad nobody writes software to use the fs that way. Most notably lots of tiny files. /etc is exactly this.
/etc approach superior because it is better documented, more transparent and I can use cp and subversion on it. Nobody will ever write a tool as powerful as subversion for the windows registry because the value isn't great enough. But subversion was never designed specifically to help with /etc it was primarily for coding but because coding has much in common with /etc the same tool can be used for both.
/etc and the best of the windows registry or better yet gconf.
Ext(2/3) use a traditional UNIX FS design and most software has been written to work acceptably on this type of file systems. In other words, nobody writes software that creates thousands to millions of tiny files because ext absolutely sucks at this (and ext4 doesn't help much) . So to get around this most of today's software create a new namespace in a single file.
reiser(fs/4) also use extents which improves its handling of really large files which is becoming more common (movies, music, etc.). ext4 introduces this feature.
So for today's common usage patterns and file sizes ext4 will perform reasonably well compared to reiser4.
But if you where to extend fs semantics enough to make it reasonable to use the fs to directly back something like gconf (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GConf), reiser4 would be substantially (10x) faster than ext(2,3,4) could ever hope to be. In principal if you extend the filesystem to directly support gconf and similar you would be able use of many fs tools for free.
Consider the windows registry. It is a mistake because it obscures the information by its convoluted structure and just as significantly, one can't use all those usefull tools on the registry you use with your file system (well not to many in Windows). Gconf addresses the first problem but not the second. Overall, I would consider the
Yet, the windows registry had the good idea of creating a consistent way to store the the same type of data. Saving programming time and building a single consistent source for all things configuration. I believe it is possible to build something that gets the best of
The more use one can get out of a tool, the more people will work to develop and improve it. By using the same namespace for as much as possible, the more value a tool designed to work with that namespace will have. In other words, the utility of a computer system is proportional to the number of ways the components can interact, not the number of components.
To achieve this objective, one needs a solid foundation, a system that can efficiently store whatever you ask of it, that is what reiser4 is trying to be. But, clearly much work remains.
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.
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