Re: ext3 vs reiserfs 3.6
Didn't make it to the list, so resending from another account.
On Fri, 2006-07-28 at 13:31 +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
>
> We (at my workplace) have lots of them, smp and not, with reiserfs and
> they don't usualy crash. They do crash a lot when we get new ones
> untill we weed out all the bad ram and such but after that the
> majority runs stable. The rest we swap cpu or the mainboard till they
> work.
>
> We still do have problems with reiserfs every now and then
> though. Having power getting cut from nodes without proper shutdown
> seems to be a problem for reiserfs. On reboot the syslogd hangs for
> ages unless /var is reformated. Recently I convinced my boss to switch
> to another filesystem but we still have to test crash (e.g. pull the
> power every 5 minutes) the different FSes a lot to see which is most
> robust.
>
> Personaly I use ext3 and never had problems on amd64.
>
I'm quite surprised to hear all these bad opinions about reiserfs since
I have never had any problems with it not caused by bad hardware.
One thing that many people seem to be missing is the fact that their
drives might have write-cache enabled. In that case, even journalling
filesystems can be damaged by non-clean unmount if they don't handle the
caching issues. Meta-data corruption in ext3 might be less visible
because of the defensive layout of its structures.
You can use hdparm/sdparm to find out if the write-cache is enabled on
your drives and disable it. Note that disabling write-cache can cause
performance loss and decrease MTBF of the drive.
If you use reiserfs or ext3 then you can keep write-cache enabled, since
those filesystems support that setup via mount options. Use
barrier=flush for reiserfs and barrier=1 for ext3.
See this website for more info:
http://www-dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de/~ma/linux/kernel/safe-write-caches.html
Michal Palka
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