Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
Slashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters. Anecdote Battles.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
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