RE: ReiserFS, ext3 (was: 'praise to the debian gods')
> > That having been said, I think most people would agree that
> > ReiserFS is mature enough for almost any use at this point,
> > and I'm not aware of any glaring problems with it.
>
> Aside from, say, the lack of good repair tools. Or do they
> have one now? That really works?
That I can't answer definitively, but I would expect it to have some
decent tools by now. Maybe someone else can shed some light on this.
> I wouldn't consider ReiserFS suitable for any
> mission-critical systems.
Well, that's why I qualified it with the previous statements. But I'm
sure there are some sane, learned people that would argue it's perfectly
stable and has been around longer than ext3.
The comments I've heard from those actively using it are quite positive.
Granted, they may be an unusually optimistic group.
> > swap. On the other hand, 32MB is reserved for the journal,
> > so it would be rather wasteful to use it on very small
> > partitions like /boot.
>
> Is that 32MB a fixed value regardless of the size of the fs?
> Ext3's journal varies in size according to the size of the
> fs. The ext3 journal in my /boot partition is only 1MB.
That is the apparent result when running it via the modified kernel from
Ian Eure's netinst 3.0. It seemed to have (at least) 32MB no matter
what the partition size, but whether this is a fixed value across the
board, I don't know.
> > down the road at least. For now, the "balanced tree"
> > should give you performance increases, as much as 15 times
> > that of ext2 (in some cases).
>
> Possibly. Of course, when people run these tests for
> promotional or journalistic purposes, they're generally doing
> it on freshly-made partitions. Try it on a ReiserFS partition
> that's been heavily used for a year and see if you still get
> such nice results.
Oh, absolutely. Whenever you see statistics you should question them,
and this case is no different. Perhaps I should have changed "in some
cases" to "claimed to be".
> > course, I should add that ext3 is also "experimental".
>
> But quite stable at this point. I've been running ext3 on all
> my fs's for several months, and have never seen a problem
> that resulted from ext3 itself.
Which is why I pointed it out. ;)
> > inodes. Journaling requires less system resources, but
> > logging would recover any lost data much faster. Reiser,
> > XFS and ext3 all have options to support both these methods.
>
> From my understanding, you're confusing a couple of different
> things here. The distinction you're trying to make is between
> "full data journaling", which writes file data as well as
> directory and inode information to the journal, and
> "metadata-only journaling", which only writes directory and
> inode changes to the journal. If you journal only the
I could be wrong here. At this point, I was parsing what I had read
from several sources, but as I interpreted it, file data is included.
Mainly I just wanted to give him further ideas to factor into the
decision process, and maybe shouldn't have gone into so much detail.
Jeff Bonner
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