what other filesystem? [LWN.net]

what other filesystem?

Posted May 4, 2008 3:29 UTC (Sun) by astrophoenix (subscriber, #13528)
Parent article: On the conviction of Hans Reiser

I've been using reiser3 for years now on all my systems. I know it's still maintained, but
seeing 
"Reiserfs is nearing the end of its run" being written makes me think I should switch to
something 
else. but what? when I switched from ext3 to reseirfs I saw a decent performance increase on
the 
types of files I deal with (lots of small files), so I don't really want to go back to that.
any 
suggestions?

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what other filesystem?

Posted May 5, 2008 19:11 UTC (Mon) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link]

I was using reiserfs for the same reason until some little bit of 
corruption ballooned into kernel panics and random reboots. I switched 
back to ext3 and I've been happy since.

ext3 hasn't stood still

Posted May 6, 2008 16:49 UTC (Tue) by james (subscriber, #1325) [Link]

ext3 hasn't stood still over the years -- there have been a number of projects to improve performance. A quick Google suggests these links.

So your earlier experience may no longer be accurate.

James.

what other filesystem?

Posted May 8, 2008 19:30 UTC (Thu) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

For some of my current use cases, the fact that reiserfs hasn't been improved in years is a
good thing -- that means that relatively few bugs have been added to it in recent years.  ;-)

Regards,

Zooko

what other filesystem?

Posted May 8, 2008 19:31 UTC (Thu) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

Oh, following up to my own post because I thought I should link to the allmydata.org Tahoe
Least-Authority Filesystem Bibliography page:

http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Bibliography

where I just added links to four papers analyzing safety of several filesystems including
reiserfs.

what other filesystem?

Posted May 13, 2008 11:15 UTC (Tue) by zmi (subscriber, #4829) [Link]

That was my first thought also. Being from Austria/Europe, I just hear now 
that Reiser murdered, and I do not have any more information about that 
and also don't really care too much. Seems like they believe she's dead 
but nobody found her. But that's another story.

"Reiserfs is nearing the end of its run" is what strikes me. I've been 
using it for years, and had some very bad and nasty hardware issues that 
destroyed hard disk contents, but could get back most of the data on it.

The biggest issue was once a broken RAID controller decided to rebuild a 
RAID with the wrong disk. He thought the new empty disk was good and one 
existing disk was the spare disk, and rebuilt RAID-5 checksums. Which, 
obviously, simply destroyed whatever useful was there. That way, the first 
~20-30GB of the 500GB RAID contents were completely destroyed, including 
partition tables etc. With "reiserfck --rebuild-tree" I got most 
information back and that's why I stick to this filesystem. I know now how 
to get it back in case of problems, no matter how speedy other filesystems 
could be, that is the most interesting point for me.

Speed doesn't matter anymore once your data is gone.