The Secret World of ReiserFS (Yahoo!News)

Posted Feb 17, 2004 22:25 UTC (Tue) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link]

Works fine on RH 8, despite no QA from RH.

Also has worked perfectly trouble free on SUSE for a long time. "Catastrophic Failure?" Not here, yet at least ...

Posted Feb 17, 2004 22:31 UTC (Tue) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link]

catastrophic failure? Hmm, those stuffy European banks trusting their data to suse linux servers would not take kindly to catastrophic failure. Of all the suse boxes I've deployed, they just run and run for years, no worries.

I do like fedora though, and although it may be possible for a clever and persistent sys admin to actually get fedora installed on reiserfs, such options do not fall into the category of those seen by mere mortals. The list of possible file systems on the fedora installer include, oddly enough, fat32, but no reiserfs. I'd like to see them stop being so bashful, and put reiserfs right there on the menu with the other choices.

Posted Feb 17, 2004 22:36 UTC (Tue) by ccyoung (guest, #16340) [Link]

on my CD's, the installation only supports EXT2/3. would be nice to be able to install on Reiser as well.

Did you use the reiser-utils package? If so, can you overwrite an EXT3?

Posted Feb 18, 2004 0:42 UTC (Wed) by petegn (guest, #847) [Link]

Well i have run with Reiserfs since it's first release and hag no problems
at all with failures other than a welded CPU

With uptimes running into months very regurlary(SP) it's too early in the
morniong for spelling ..

Cheers pete.

Posted Feb 18, 2004 3:24 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I believe the reason is that Reiser3 got itself included before it was really ready; by now it has become stable. The developers also learned their lesson, and are not pushing for inclusion of Reiser4 until it is really ready.

Posted Feb 18, 2004 8:36 UTC (Wed) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

Well, I'm glad you are open minded enough to experiment. Some wouldn't
be, but I expect you will be pleasantly surprised.

I've been running ReiserFS (3) since I installed Mandrake 8.1 back when I
switched from MSWormOS (FAT32.. now THERE'S an FS to which
"catastrophic failure" might apply..). Even running it on a CPU that was
unstable due to having been run at 100% utilization for months on end while
overclocked, with the resulting hard lockups due to hardware issues, I've
never had "catastrophic failure". Sure, a file lost here or there, because it's
metadata journalling not data AND metadata (as is ext3 at its slowest but
most dependable setting), but reboot and back running, sometime replacing
the file if necessary, right away. Early on, there WERE times when I had to
do a reiserfsck --rebuild-tree, which is pretty serious, but even then, I never
had catastrophic failure -- again even with bad hardware causing hard locks at
the most inopportune times AND constantly running Mandrake cooker! I
haven't had to do even that (--rebuild-tree) in ages.

I'm now running Mandrake for AMD64, on a dual opteron system, and am
not thrilled with the OS stability there, but again, I'm running alpha quality
cooker software on a fairly new hardware platform that doesn't yet have all
the kinks worked out (I believe one of the problems is with the sound,
possibly a not-64-bit clean driver for the onboard AMD8111 aka i810 sound,
which seems to cause hard locks on occasion -- thru several kernels including
current 2.6), and despite all that, Reiser brings it back up every time! Again,
it isn't data journalling, only metadata, and I did lose part of a couple RPM
packages and had to reinstall them, when the system crashed in the middle of
an install. However, that's not the filesystem's fault, when I'm running
bleeding edge software on new and still a bit buggy hardware and kernel
compiled for it, and if any scenario has catastrophic failure written all over it,
it should be mine, but nothing even close.

Reiserfs has provided everything I expected of it in terms of reliability, and
more.

Duncan