Re: OT: which journaling file system
On Thu, Jul 19, 2001 at 01:11:39PM -0700, Mike Fedyk wrote:
> I thought that ReiserFS does journal the file contents. Can someone
> point us to some docs that say for sure?
It is in the Reiser FAQ, iirc.
I had to recently decide between XFS, Reiser, or EXT3. I've been using EXT3
for a few months now without any problems and it is by far the easiest
filesystem to use if you're currently using EXT2. The ability to switch
back and forth between EXT3 and EXT2 almost on the fly is nice. However, I
wanted a filesystem with the ability to be expanded while it was still
mounted. This doesn't seem to be an option with EXT3 so I decided to look
at the other journaling filesystems. Both XFS and Reiser allows expansion
while they are still mounted. However, theres no way to shrink an XFS
filesystem, mounted or otherwise, other than the traditional way of
backup/recreate/restore. Reiser filesystems, on the other hand, can be
shrunk (though you need to unmount the filesystem before you can shrink it).
So I decided to go with Reiser and so far I haven't encountered a whole lot
of problems. Except one. Doing a "gzip -r" on a directory thats on a
Reiser filesystem can return a non-zero error code which can break some
Debian source package makefiles (which tries to run a "gzip -r" on
documentation and man page directories before it deb-ifies the package). I
looked at the gzip source and apparently this is a "bug" with the algorithm
gzip uses to recurse directories, and not a bug with Reiser (which was what
I originally thought). A simple hack to gzip to not return a non-zero error
code if the "-r" is specified on the command line was the quick-n-dirty fix
for this.
- Arcadio
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