Reiserfs -- comments?

Post #4,551 by slugbug 8/10/01 4:50:59 PM Reply	Reiserfs -- comments? Sorry for the spam.....I'm looking for comments from anyone here who has been using Reiserfs. Any opinions on it?
Post #4,556 by admin 8/10/01 6:41:34 PM Reply	What spam? That's what this forum is for, Maggie. :-) Regards, -scott anderson
Post #4,558 by imric 8/10/01 7:04:39 PM Reply	smile Maybe she's thinking of using the 'IWETHEY group mind' as a journalistic resource? That makes it 'commercial', I guess - though you're right, the unsolicited part of spam doesn't really apply, as it's on-topic for the forum. Besides, she's one of us - a 'node' in the IGM, as it were! Imric's Tips for Living Paranoia Is a Survival Trait Pessimists are never disappointed - but sometimes, if they are very lucky, they can be pleasantly surprised...
Post #4,588 by slugbug 8/10/01 10:52:41 PM Reply	Re: smile I am considering writing a piece on Reiserfs since I've been goofing around with it. Just curious if anyone had any opinions on it. Wouldn't mind a few quotes if someone felt like sharing, but not necessary. Is DRL around? He likes Reiserfs a lot as I recall in one of his posts. -Mags
Post #4,591 by boxley 8/10/01 11:24:35 PM Reply	Reiserf desitter might know where drl is. thanx, bill Our bureaucracy and our laws have turned the world into a clean, safe work camp. We are raising a nation of slaves. Chuck Palahniuk
Post #4,587 by slugbug 8/10/01 10:48:23 PM Reply	Re: What spam? heh!
Post #4,557 by imric 8/10/01 6:59:31 PM Reply	Hmmm. Might be a boring topic. It just works, for me. No issues, really - had an unexpected benefit this afternoon - thunderstorms came through, and I'm not hitched to a UPS, so I switched off my workstation. When it seemed that the bulk of the boomers had passed, I switched it back on. 'Replayed' a few transactions, no problems (fast!). This might be a good thing for Linux-based consumer devices, I suppose (A/V players, etc.). I've heard disk quotas aren't supported under reiserfs - is this still true? (I dunno, I don't use 'em). Imric's Tips for Living Paranoia Is a Survival Trait Pessimists are never disappointed - but sometimes, if they are very lucky, they can be pleasantly surprised...
Post #4,600 by bepatient 8/11/01 12:50:20 AM Reply	Send Nick a note... he was using it and even did a column on the installation, IIRC. Um...er...well... I have no choice! [link\|mailto:bepatient@aol.com\|BePatient]
Post #4,603 by static 8/11/01 2:43:17 AM Reply	Not used it myself... ... but if Gibbo is around, he should be able to give you some first-hand knowledge. I know he was playing around with it on his Linux desktop. Wade. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #4,609 by Steve Lowe 8/11/01 3:39:46 AM Reply	Neither have I However, I think Addison's using it, and I know Nick is. Here's Nick's article on it at IWE: [link\|http://iwsun4.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/10/30/001030oppetreley.xml\|http://iwsun4.infow...petreley.xml] ----- Steve
Post #4,616 by slugbug 8/11/01 11:02:06 AM Reply	Thanks for the link!
Post #4,615 by slugbug 8/11/01 11:01:26 AM Reply	Re: Not used it myself... thanks!
Post #4,619 by Another Scott 8/11/01 11:12:04 AM Reply	I thought Andy Grygus had some comments about it... I have vague recollections that he'd read that Caldera said reiserfs can have problems with file corruption under very heavy load. But I've not been able to find anything to back up that recollection... I didn't see anything on [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|[link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|http://www.aaxnet.com]] about reiserfs. Everything else I've read about it has been amazingly positive. No personal experience though... Cheers, Scott.
Post #4,620 by a6l6e6x 8/11/01 11:23:54 AM 8/11/01 11:27:06 AM Reply	Ditto! [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=2529\|Link to Andrew's post.] Alex Only two things are certain: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not certain about the universe. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Edited by a6l6e6x Aug. 11, 2001, 11:27:06 AM EDT Expand All History
Post #4,621 by Andrew Grygus 8/11/01 11:54:08 AM Reply	This was brought up . . . . at a Caldera reseller briefing which outlined Caldera's marketing strategy and was followed with a tech session explaining the inner working of the Linux Kernel Personality structure for Open Unix. During the market strategy session they used reiserfs as an example of why Caldera has prominently labeled certain Linux components as "experimental" while other distributions do not label them so clearly. The statement was that Caldera engineers had found reiserfs can result in data corruption under very heavy loads. The implication was that the conditions were unusual, but might be encountered in very intense business server applications. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #4,684 by addison 8/11/01 10:05:35 PM Reply	Re: Reiserfs -- comments? Well, I noted what happens if you give the mkreiser command a disk, rather than a partition. :) Other than that, nope, other that its really nice when my machine crashes (I've apparently isolated it to something using gtk). Has to check / and /var, and my big /save partition... but eerything else just mounts. One of the linux users at work was saying nice things about ext3 - which converted automatically, as opposed to reiser, which requires a reformat. (and I'm not sure what would happen if I needed a rescue CD or something... Probably need to look into making something bootable for that. Don't have any speed comparisons or anything. Addison
Post #4,706 by kmself 8/12/01 1:07:47 AM Reply	Experiences, comments -- largely positive. I've been using reiserfs under 2.2.18 since January of this year on my laptop. Very satisfied customer. General comments: Installation required snarfing the patch and applying it to the kernel. No issues there. There's a little dance you have to go through if you're converting an existing GNU/Linux installation to reiserfs -- which you're very likely doing as few GNU/Linux installs (I know of none) roll out reiserfs by default. It's called the reiserfs shuffle, and involves backing off your data, reformatting the partition, and restoring the data. For all partitions but / (root), this can be done without rebooting, preferably from single-user mode. For your root partition, you'll have to boot an alternative system (more below). My own suggestion is to create two root filesystems, one to be used as a backup and/or for maintenance, which greatly simplifies any number of issues. Very small partitions and reiserfs don't go together awfully well. There's a certain amount of overhead (forget what) that's required. Anything below about 10-20MB is going to suffer significant loss to journal overhead. You're also not saving much in a reiserfs core benefit: fast crash recovery. An fsck of a 10MB partition runs in a matter of seconds, about the same as a journal rollback. What might such small partitions be? Typically, /boot, possibly /tmp. There's the additional issue that LILO and reiserfs don't interact too well (though grub's supposed to be better). I've created an ext2fs /boot partition and mount it read-only, except when performing system admin. There were issues with reiserfs corruption in some early 2.4.x series kernels. These seem to have been resolved as of 2.4.4 or thereabouts -- with current kernels (2.4.8 was released today) there's little issue. The 2.2.x series was never effected by these issues AFAIK. My installation is on a laptop, as noted. The box is known to be shut down suddenly, run out of battery power, and, it went through a period of crashes (bad power connection compounded by poor Speedstep CPU support in GNU/Linux). Never suffered any corruption, watched my journals replay in 1-3 seconds, for partitions of up to 10 GB. Very nice. Documentation for reiserfs still lags. Responded to a recent debian-user issue in which ext2fs mount options (errors=remount) turned out not to be supported under reiserfs. The current Debian `mount (1)` manpage doesn't specify reiserfs options. As noted above, you may need a rescue disk for your reiserfs system. Problem is that most popular rescue systems don't have reiserfs support, including Tom's Root/Boot. One exception is recent versions of the LinuxCare BBC (bootable business card), version 1.5 of which includes reiserfs support. Other tools can be modified to provide such support, so explore your options. Though reiserfs was the first of the generally available GNU/Linux journalling filesystems, there are now several to choose from, including ext3fs, XFS, and JFS. Word is that there are utilities to convert directly from ext2fs filesystems to ext3fs. Various performance claims are also made among the various filesystems. Performance: mostly anecdotal. Some people argue that journaling is inherently slower than a write-behind cached filesystem (e.g.: ext2fs). OTOH, there was an interesting post, to LinuxToday, IIRC, in the past few weeks arguing that for certain types of (relatively common) metadata transactions, journaling can in fact be much faster. Naturally, there are the usual partisan debates over which journaling FS is fastest. Cheers. -- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Post #4,753 by a6l6e6x 8/12/01 3:11:37 PM Reply	Good stuff, Karsten! Thanks. Alex Only two things are certain: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not certain about the universe. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Post #4,761 by pwhysall 8/12/01 5:30:02 PM Reply	The pressing question for me is what's so great about ReiserFS that I'll want to do the format and restore shuffle on my partitions, when (if the developers deliver on what they say) I'll be able to convert my existing partitions to ext3? That question remains unanswered. -- Peter Shill For Hire
Post #4,769 by kmself 8/12/01 6:00:46 PM Reply	Good one Up until recently, reiserfs has been the only choice. As more become available, relative benefits may pay out. Currently, reiserfs has a longer track record than any other GNU/Linux jfs, though it's not all been good. I guess the question boils down to current need vs. flexibility. My experience was that the reiserfs shuffle wasn't too painful. -- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Post #4,774 by ben_tilly 8/12/01 7:10:12 PM Reply	Well what has me curious about it... If you abuse your filesystem as a database, you are likely to have a ton of small files somewhere. And some big files elsewhere. I understand that ReiserFS is supposed to do a very good job of making tradeoffs between these two situations dynamically. Ext3 is just ext2 with some extra journaling meta-data stored. Put a few thousand files in a directory, and it slows down. I haven't yet had time and resources to give this a try, but this feature interests me. Cheers, Ben
Post #4,783 by kmself 8/12/01 8:36:47 PM Reply	Large directories: very fast performance w/ reiserfs Reiserfs definitely screams relative to ext2fs on larg directory listings. Example: the IWE forums archive consists of single-file posts in one directory, with 124,657 files. Doing `time \\ls \| wc -l` on the directory reads in just under four seconds. Read time under ext2 was significantly longer, many seconds, possibly a minute or more. Turning off directory sorting (-U flag), read is reduced to under a second (0.791, 0.772, 0.856, 0.780, in repeated trials). The difference: reiserfs stores directories as hash tables. In ext2fs, they're serial lists. It took literally hours to unpack the archive I'd received from Craig under ext2. Note that there are still issues with large directories, but rieserfs will deal with them. Note also that I'm using an escaped 'ls' to disable colored listing, which requires reading the first few (512 IIRC) bytes of a file to determine its magic. With "--color=auto" and directory sorting, the listing takes 2:32.097s to run. -- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?

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