Re: a good argument for ext3 or reiserfs
jeff said:
> i'm considering converting my current ext2 file system on my nice debian
> box. could i get some feedback from the list? i have read through some
> manuals and how-to's but i would like to hear personal experience on
> what you think might be better or maybe faster or whathaveyou.
>
> 1) my box is just a home internet station... which would be 'better' in
> your opinion.
Depends on your needs and more importantly what kernel your running.
e.g. I am still firmly in the camp that does not see 2.4.x being ready
for use on my systems(other then test systems which run redhat/suse).
If you are using 2.4.x then you can pretty much ignore this argument but
I think its worth making.
Because of the fact that I use only 2.2.x on my "main" systems(both work
and at home, specifically 2.2.19 is my kernel of choice despite 2.2.21
available I think?) reiserfs is the only "stable journalling filesystem
on 2.2.x. Last time this discussion came up another poster noted that
ext3 *was* available for 2.2.x, but everytime I've looked what I can
find says ext3 is no longer maintained on 2.2.x. This bothers me to
the point where I won't use it unless I can find evidence of some
support. From my readings on kernel traffic I seem to remember ext3
on 2.2.x being dropped from active support more then a year ago. In some
cases this may not be an issue. But, about 7 months ago I found what
I would consider a CRITICAL bug in reiserfs. If you want the specifics
email me offlist, but it was serious for my servers(would cause an
immediate system reboot w/o warning). I spent a full day researching
this bug, trying to trace it down, sent an email to Hans Reiser(sp?),
with a 2-3 page report on my findings, he forwarded it to a few other
developers, within I think 24 hours I had a fix for the problem. If I
were to run into such a problem on ext3 I would be SOL pretty much.
My company employed a lot of UNIX developers, but none did kernel level
stuff.
that said. reiserfs on 2.2.x is not perfect. It is not compadible with
software raid 1,5 on 2.2.x. As a result if I a using software raid
I use ext2. Another downside to reiserfs(at least on 2.2.x) is it's
apparant lack of bad block support. so it probably isn't a good idea
to use it on older drives or in an enviornment where drives may fail
often(excluding situations where such drives are on hardware raid
arrays). Reiserfs also does not support EAs/ACLs as far as I know(at
least under 2.2.x).
I like reiserfs because from what I've seen its a ground-up write for
a filesystem, unlike ext3 which maintains a lot of ext2 code in it
for backwards compadiblity(which has it's upsides too of course). EXT3
is the obvious choice if your running 2.4.x and wish to "upgrade"
from ext2. I prefer to wipe filesystems and reformat them outright
though.
I also like reiserfs because it has been in development much longer,
has(I think) a dedicated development team on it, and is generally more
mature(SuSE has been using it as their primary fs for a couple years).
> 2) what's a good url for ext3 how-to
not sure...
>
> 3) what's a good url for resierfs how-to
not sure either but www.namesys.com would be a good start.
I use reiserfs in several configurations from laptops with 500MB partitions
to servers with 36GB single-partition scsi drives, to larger file servers
with 6-disk raid10 arrays with 220GB partitions. I built a new server
at home with 5x9.1GB hardware raid5 with redhat 7.3 and ext3 and am seeing how
well it works, sofar no problems. I do like SuSE's installer more it
gives several filesystem options for installing including ext2/ext3/xfs I
believe.
nate
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