From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Carl-Daniel Hailfinger Subject: Re: ReiserFS is not suitable for a root FS. Date: Sat, 17 May 2003 13:14:15 +0200 Message-ID: <3EC61987.5000402@gmx.net> References: <200305172030.58775.russell@coker.com.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: list-help: list-unsubscribe: list-post: Errors-To: flx@namesys.com In-Reply-To: <200305172030.58775.russell@coker.com.au> List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: Russell Coker Cc: ReiserFS Russell Coker wrote: > With a ReiserFS file system you can't FSCK a file system that is mounted > read-only. This means that when a root file system needs to be FSCK'd you > need to boot from installation media (or convert the swap space into a > temporary root file system). I take this as a feature request. Right? It would certainly be nice to have. > It seems that the kernel drivers in 2.4.20 have some bugs whereby a corrupted > file system can cause an immediate reboot, a system lock (caps-lock doesn't > change the keyboard led), or a kernel Oops. Ext2/3 does not appear to have > such problems. Could you please provide a metadata dump of the affected filesystem? The behaviour you describe is not supposed to happen. Do you have a decoded Oops for us to see what happened? Believe me, ext2 had other problems like silent corruption even without crashes or unclean shutdowns triggering it. After about 20-30 reboots, my ext2 root filesystem was corrupted. This bug plagued me from 2.4.0-test until recently. It now seems to be fixed. > When machines crash it seems that there is a risk of a file system corruption, > a crash on boot seems reasonably likely to damage the root file system. My > laptop (my main test machine) has had two serious corruptions of the root > file system this year which caused kernel crashing on boot. > > My conclusion is that until these issues are addressed ReiserFS is not > suitable for a root file system. Then when such problems occur it will be > easy to fsck the file system. Also ext2 has smaller kernel modules giving a ^^^^ You surely mean ext3? Ext2 would not be a fair comparison because it has no journaling. And if you're hunting for size, try jffs or jffs2. > smaller initrd. Regards, Carl-Daniel -- http://www.hailfinger.org/