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Best Shrinkable ReiserFS Replacement?
paulkoan writes "I have been using ReiserFS for my file system across a few servers for some time now (follow the link below for details of my experience). I can't foresee the future of ReiserFS, but if I'm going to have to migrate as support diminishes, I'd like to begin that process now. My criteria are: in-kernel support, shrinkable, and has good recovery when the file system is not closed properly. That shrinkable requirement precludes a lot of options. What's a good replacement for ReiserFS?"
I initially chose ReiserFS because I was building a MythTV system and it was the recommended FS across the board, from small to large files. I've had good experiences with ReiserFS and it has had a pummeling. That MythTV box for example has a very volatile environment and loses power on a regular basis. I haven't lost any data through any of these outages.
Compare this to my brief foray into XFS on the same box, where 25% of the filesystem ended up in lost+found with numbers for filenames. When this happened a second time on a different system I decided XFS wasn't for me — and I really don't get the point of a journalled filesystem that will keep data relatively safe, but then remove any means to identify it when things go wrong.
But everyone has good and bad experiences with filesystems, ReiserFS included. XFS has a good rep, my experience aside.
I initially chose ReiserFS because I was building a MythTV system and it was the recommended FS across the board, from small to large files. I've had good experiences with ReiserFS and it has had a pummeling. That MythTV box for example has a very volatile environment and loses power on a regular basis. I haven't lost any data through any of these outages.
Compare this to my brief foray into XFS on the same box, where 25% of the filesystem ended up in lost+found with numbers for filenames. When this happened a second time on a different system I decided XFS wasn't for me — and I really don't get the point of a journalled filesystem that will keep data relatively safe, but then remove any means to identify it when things go wrong.
But everyone has good and bad experiences with filesystems, ReiserFS included. XFS has a good rep, my experience aside.
I would use LVM and EXT3.
You can use LVM to change the size of the partition, and then use resize2fs to shrink it to fit the LVM
Google around, you'll find some good docs
Found here:https://www.redhat.com/archives/nahant-list/2007-March/msg00004.html
fsck
resize2fs (resize to smaller then needed)
lvm (resize to the size needed)
resize2fs (grow to fill LVM vol.)
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
If you can use something other than Linux, then ZFS is the winner. Take a look at the FreeBSD ZFS Quick Start, particularly the examples. That's possibly the coolest filesystem demo I've ever seen.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
... I'm much more interested in a cache filesystem that will use local storage as a cache for network storage. Our corporate computing is horribly bottlenecked at the NAS while we have hundreds of gigabytes on every server and workstation sitting unused.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Filesystem was so big issue in my work that we bite the bulled and tried first Open Solaris and then switched into Nexenta http://www.nexenta.org/ Nexenta is OpenSolaris kernel GNU/Debian/Ubutntu userland. What this gets to you is ZFS and RAID-Z and RAID-Z2. When you get used to the fact that your filesystems has end to end quarantee of data integrity by hashing (even cryptographic hashing if you want, you feel uncomfortable with any other filesystem. In home I still run Linux on my laptop, but I made my own NAS that ruons with Nexenta.
Dyslexics have more fnu.
EXT3 works perfectly on my Myth box and is probably the best filesystem for use with an up to date installation. The reason it was previously not recommened with Myth is because it takes a long time to delete large files on EXT3, so if you delete a file whilst making a recording, you can get a drop-out. However, Myth backend now has an option for slow background deletion of large files; if you enable it, you won't have any problems. Given the amount of RAM on a typical modern media server, though, it's unlikely that a drop-out would occur - the system would just cache the recording ntil the hard drive became available.
I, too, have lost data with abrupt power loss on XFS. JFS doesn't auto-repair on startup with Ubuntu, so that's not a good option unless you want to manually run FSCK every time you have power outage. Any other filesystem isn't mainstream so is best avoided.
Well, especially with filesystems we are in the your mileage may vary boat. We kicked ext3 out of our server room in favour of ReiserFS because we had constant problems with ext3 on several servers. Not data loss (we had with neither), but rebooting our servers (especially the development server) almost always required a fsck at boot and it always had to repair the FS. This meant several hours of down-time just because of a reboot (e.g. because we moved the server to a new UPS) which became unacceptable. No such problems with ReiserFS.
I think by now everyone has his horror stories to back either ext3's or ReiserFS's side so it's a kind of vi vs. emacs war by now, IMHO. I'm happily using ReiserFS and vi for almost a decade now ;-)
It's really a shame ZFS is not available on Linux (only via FUSE)... I am really impressed by its capabilities (have an OpenSolaris server).
If you do have a good reason for needing a shrinkable filesystem, does it have to be online shrinkable? I know a lot of people shrink existing FAT or NTFS filesystems to install another operating system for dual-boot, but that's normally done offline, not while the filesystem in question is mounted. In such cases, although it's convenient to shrink in place, it's not necessary, especially since you really need to back up the contents of the filesystem first anyhow. (If the data isn't worth backing up in case of a problem with shrinking the FS, it's not worth keeping in the first place.)
Why don't they just give the filesystem's creator a computer and have him continue to update it from inside the cell? He'll have plenty of time to get it done, still won't be out on the streets, and if he enjoys it then it won't be cruel and unusual punishment.