Filesystems

[Stuart Jansen]

On Thu, 2005-09-01 at 21:26 -0600, Andrew McNabb wrote:
> I've always had negative feelings towards Reiser FS, and I'm not sure
> whether it's just misguided prejudice or if it's really justified.  I've
> heard at least a couple of horror stories, and I've gotten the feeling
> that stability isn't a top goal.  Is it still this way, or has it never
> been this way, or has it improved?

I've only ever seen one total data loss because of purely software
problems and reiserfs on SuSE [the caps are a hint that this was Some
Time Ago(tm)] was the culprit. Hans Reiser's opinion is that error
correction should be handled in hardware, not software. LKML members are
leery of including the latest reiserfs 4 code because it looks ugly to
them.

That said, reiserfs seems to be much kinder to hardware. On a couple of
occasions, jochc has shared his personal experience using reiserfs on a
seriously large number of disks. He saw significantly lower rates of
failure after switching to reiserfs. Of all "evidence" I've encountered,
both pro and con, his is the most compelling.

I also like that reiserfs (unlike ext2/ext3) can add inodes if it starts
running out.

I've heard it said "there are two types of reiserfs user: 1) those who
tried reiserfs and love it and 2) those who tried reiserfs on Red Hat
Linux". If reiserfs isn't a high priority on your distro of choice,
you're probably in for a bumpier ride. If someone is helping to do good
Q&A on it, you might love it.

-- 
Stuart Jansen              e-mail/jabber: sjansen at buscaluz.org
                           google talk:   stuart.jansen at gmail.com
:0                         # copy & paste for your convenience
* ^From:.*sjansen@
/dev/null                  # /ignore sjansen!*@*
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://plug.org/pipermail/plug/attachments/20050901/6587d6e2/attachment.bin