On Tue, 15 Feb 2005, Jeffrey W. Baker wrote:
Surely you aren't implying that Reiser uses anything as pedestrian as a b-tree! Why, Reiser's tree format is so novel, so utterly perfect, that no human could have ever thought of it. I understand their patent applications is sailing through the approval process, greeted by nothing but disbelief and Hosannas.
LOL.I actually like ReiserFS. I do take Hans with a grain of salt, since quite a while after he declared his FS "ready for production" I found out his consistency check/recovery tools were still "Beta," and it wasn't uncommon for them to just choke and dump core. Maybe this is arguable, but I always thought a working "*fsck" was part of the whole production package.
This was all some time back. The problems were eventually addressed (from what I gather) years ago, and I haven't had any non-hardware-related "incidents" with the FS in years of pretty constant abuse.
Unfortunately XFS also repeatedly swallowed a number of my volumes. I found it to be more unstable than any filesystem I have used (save VxFS). When using XFS, one must not read from the underlying device, or one risks corruption. This leads one to believe that using XFS on LVM, md, or enbd would be somewhat risky. fsck.xfs is sometimes at a loss to recover anything at all in these situations, even after running for days. That said, XFS is still your best choice if you've hit the hard limits in ext3.
Ahh... _that_ said, it looks like (until they fix it) XFS is the best choice for punishing your enemies with. :o
I hate to say it, but this is not the only place I have heard Linux/XFS horror stories. Of course I actually love experimenting, and there's nothing wrong with a work in progress, just so long as it's labeled.
I guess the moral of the story is that if you've got a big partition, I hope you've got an even bigger backup tape. ;)