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Re: Journaling FS for PPC (was Re: gcc version for kernel compiles)



Before using ReiserFS (or any other filesystem) on a production system,
or a system where you care about the data, I would suggest waiting until
at least one or two minor kernel releases have appeared in which there
have been no fixes for the filesystem.

There were fixes to ReiserFS in both 2.4.2 and 2.4.3, so if 2.4.4
appears and the changelog doesn't document anything being done to
ReiserFS, then it is likely that the fixes in 2.4.3 are what is needed
to make it reliable.

This is not to say you shouldn't contribute to the testing of ReiserFS;
if you can spare a partition, put reiserfs on it and try stuff out.  But
I wouldn't trust data that you care about with it.

Here's a page I wrote about kernel testing, some of the test suites
would be useful for ReiserFS testing:

Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel
http://linuxquality.sunsite.dk/articles/testsuites/

(I'd be interested to find out about PowerPC-specific memory stress
tools that one could use as I use memtest86 on my x86 machines).

If you can't spare a partition, it may work to make a large regular file
in an ext2 partition and create a reiserfs in that file and mount it via
the loopback device, the same way you would an encrypted filesystem
using the patches from http://www.kerneli.org .  

I use this technique to check out ISO9660 images before I burn them to CD:

mount -o loop image.iso /mnt

will mount a regular file named image.iso if it contains a recognized
filesystem such as ISO9660 or ReiserFS.  You'll need to include the loop
device in your kernel build.

Regards,

Mike



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