Reiser4 default in Underground Dekstop distribution

Reiser4 default in Underground Dekstop distribution

[Peter Foldiak]

The preview of the April (!?!) 2006 issue of Linux Magazine has an article
http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/65/Super_Underground_Desktop.pdf
saying that Reiser4 is the root filesystem for the distribution "Underground 
Desktop"
http://www.ludos.org/
but says "it failed to live up to the expectations we had for Reiser4", 
blaming Reiser4 for some performance problems. Not much detail is given.

It also says that "Grub does not support Reiser4", so LILO is used. (Is that 
true?)

Do you know of any other distributions that comes with Reiser4 by default root 
file system?

 Peter

Re: Reiser4 default in Underground Dekstop distribution

[Peter Foldiak]

correction:
Sorry, I now see on their site that:
"Underground Desktop 022 ... the filesystem is now reiserfs v3 instead of 
reiser4 - which seems not enough stable and fast - and the bootloader is grub 
instead of lilo."
(It's funny, their "April" edition was already out of date in early February.) 
Peter

Re: Reiser4 default in Underground Dekstop distribution

[Hans Reiser]

There are so little details that it is hard to know what the problem
they had was.  It does sound though like we need to smooth out the
commits.  We have deferred that for a while.  I know how we should do
it, we just need to do it.  Sigh, there are so many things like
that.....  Probably fsync should be optimized first....

Hans

Peter Foldiak wrote:

>The preview of the April (!?!) 2006 issue of Linux Magazine has an article
>http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/65/Super_Underground_Desktop.pdf
>saying that Reiser4 is the root filesystem for the distribution "Underground 
>Desktop"
>http://www.ludos.org/
>but says "it failed to live up to the expectations we had for Reiser4", 
>blaming Reiser4 for some performance problems. Not much detail is given.
>
>It also says that "Grub does not support Reiser4", so LILO is used. (Is that 
>true?)
>
>Do you know of any other distributions that comes with Reiser4 by default root 
>file system?
>
> Peter
>
>
>
>  
>

Re: Reiser4 default in Underground Dekstop distribution

[Peter Foldiak]

Marcel (Hilzinger),

Did you write this Linux Magazine article? Could you give some details on what 
the problem was?

Peter

On Sunday 26 February 2006 17:34, Hans Reiser wrote:
> There are so little details that it is hard to know what the problem
> they had was.  It does sound though like we need to smooth out the
> commits.  We have deferred that for a while.  I know how we should do
> it, we just need to do it.  Sigh, there are so many things like
> that.....  Probably fsync should be optimized first....
>
> Hans
>
> Peter Foldiak wrote:
> >The preview of the April (!?!) 2006 issue of Linux Magazine has an article
> >http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/65/Super_Underground_Desktop.pdf
> >saying that Reiser4 is the root filesystem for the distribution
> > "Underground Desktop"
> >http://www.ludos.org/
> >but says "it failed to live up to the expectations we had for Reiser4",
> >blaming Reiser4 for some performance problems. Not much detail is given.
> >
> >It also says that "Grub does not support Reiser4", so LILO is used. (Is
> > that true?)
> >
> >Do you know of any other distributions that comes with Reiser4 by default
> > root file system?
> >
> > Peter

Re: Reiser4 default in Underground Dekstop distribution

[jp]

Peter Foldiak wrote:
> Marcel (Hilzinger),
>
> Did you write this Linux Magazine article? Could you give some details on what 
> the problem was?
>
> Peter
>
> On Sunday 26 February 2006 17:34, Hans Reiser wrote:
>   
>> There are so little details that it is hard to know what the problem
>> they had was.  It does sound though like we need to smooth out the
>> commits.  We have deferred that for a while.  I know how we should do
>> it, we just need to do it.  Sigh, there are so many things like
>> that.....  Probably fsync should be optimized first....
>>
>> Hans
>>
>> Peter Foldiak wrote:
>>     
>>> The preview of the April (!?!) 2006 issue of Linux Magazine has an article
>>> http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/65/Super_Underground_Desktop.pdf
>>> saying that Reiser4 is the root filesystem for the distribution
>>> "Underground Desktop"
>>> http://www.ludos.org/
>>> but says "it failed to live up to the expectations we had for Reiser4",
>>> blaming Reiser4 for some performance problems. Not much detail is given.
>>>       
Zenwalk Linux provides Reiser4 as one of it's fs available for any 
partition since 05/2005 (Zenwalk actually supports ext2, ext3, Reiser3, 
Reiser4 and XFS). Reiser4 is in my experience the faster journalized 
fs,  XFS comes second.
>>> It also says that "Grub does not support Reiser4", so LILO is used. (Is
>>> that true?)
>>>       
I would rather say that Grub1 (stable) is not really supported anymore, 
and Grub2 is not finished yet. Grub1 doesn't support Reiser4 until 
patched with the patch available on Namesys repository . Lately I tried 
Grub + reiser4 patch with Vanilla 2.6.15.2 : it's not stable.
Lilo is usually better than Grub in most situations, it's always 
actively supported, and supports Reiser4 out of the box.
>>> Do you know of any other distributions that comes with Reiser4 by default
>>> root file system?
>>>       
Yes, Zenwalk : a simple, yet modern OS ;)
>>> Peter
>>>       
Jean-Philippe
Zenwalk.org
>
>
>   

Re: Reiser4 default in Underground Dekstop distribution

[Hans Reiser]

Peter Foldiak wrote:

>correction:
>Sorry, I now see on their site that:
>"Underground Desktop 022 ... the filesystem is now reiserfs v3 instead of 
>reiser4 - which seems not enough stable and fast - and the bootloader is grub 
>instead of lilo."
>(It's funny, their "April" edition was already out of date in early February.) 
>Peter
>
>
>  
>
Well, we should contact the underground desktop guys and see if we can
talk them into trying a later version of reiser4.  There was a real
turkey reiser4 (both performance and stability) that we let stay out
unfixed for way too long, and it seems this was fallout from that.

Hans

Re: Reiser4 default in Underground Dekstop distribution

[Marcel Hilzinger]

Am Sonntag, 26. Februar 2006 19:34 schrieb Peter Foldiak:
> Marcel (Hilzinger),
>
> Did you write this Linux Magazine article? Could you give some details on
> what the problem was?
Yes, I wrote the article. The version I tested suffered much from the fsync 
problem. There were timeouts approx every 10 seconds, where the system didn't 
respond for a very short time (_very_ disturbing when watching videos). I 
then asked the creator of Underground Linux if he also had this problems and 
I pointet him to this list. He denied then, but it seems that other users did 
report problems with underground 022 as well. I didn't even know, that 
Underground went back to ReiserFS.


-- 
Üdvözlettel -- Mit freundlichen Grüssen,
Marcel Hilzinger

Re: Reiser4 default in Underground Dekstop distribution

[Hans Reiser]

Marcel Hilzinger wrote:

>Am Sonntag, 26. Februar 2006 19:34 schrieb Peter Foldiak:
>  
>
>>Marcel (Hilzinger),
>>
>>Did you write this Linux Magazine article? Could you give some details on
>>what the problem was?
>>    
>>
>Yes, I wrote the article. The version I tested suffered much from the fsync 
>problem. There were timeouts approx every 10 seconds, where the system didn't 
>respond for a very short time (_very_ disturbing when watching videos). I 
>then asked the creator of Underground Linux if he also had this problems and 
>I pointet him to this list. He denied then, but it seems that other users did 
>report problems with underground 022 as well. I didn't even know, that 
>Underground went back to ReiserFS.
>
>
>  
>
Interesting.  The reason it is interesting is because I can only
understand if it happened every 600 seconds due to an atom being
expired.  If it happens every 10 seconds, then my next guess as to the
culprit would be balance_dirty_pages, and perhaps entd doing too much
work at a time.  I need more data, and the exact kernel version.  Hmm. 
Maybe Vitaly can try installing it and trying to reproduce.

I assume a single cpu machine?  It would be interesting as a datapoint
to know if the problem goes away with a 2 cpu machine.

Re: Reiser4 default in Underground Dekstop distribution

[Marcel Hilzinger]

Am Mittwoch, 1. März 2006 23:51 schrieben Sie:
> Marcel Hilzinger wrote:
> >Am Sonntag, 26. Februar 2006 19:34 schrieb Peter Foldiak:
> >>Marcel (Hilzinger),
> >>
> >>Did you write this Linux Magazine article? Could you give some details on
> >>what the problem was?
> >
> >Yes, I wrote the article. The version I tested suffered much from the
> > fsync problem. There were timeouts approx every 10 seconds, where the
> > system didn't respond for a very short time (_very_ disturbing when
> > watching videos). I then asked the creator of Underground Linux if he
> > also had this problems and I pointet him to this list. He denied then,
> > but it seems that other users did report problems with underground 022 as
> > well. I didn't even know, that Underground went back to ReiserFS.
>
> Interesting.  The reason it is interesting is because I can only
> understand if it happened every 600 seconds due to an atom being
> expired.  If it happens every 10 seconds, then my next guess as to the
> culprit would be balance_dirty_pages, and perhaps entd doing too much
> work at a time.  I need more data, and the exact kernel version.  Hmm.
> Maybe Vitaly can try installing it and trying to reproduce.
>
> I assume a single cpu machine?  It would be interesting as a datapoint
> to know if the problem goes away with a 2 cpu machine.
Yes, it was a single CPU machine.  I observed the problem on a similar PC, 
too.

Underground Linux 022 should still be available for download.

-- 
Üdvözlettel -- Mit freundlichen Grüssen,
Marcel Hilzinger

Re: Reiser4 default in Underground Dekstop distribution

[Islam Amer]

Hi my livecd phaeronix http://www.phaeronix.net supports reiser4 and
resier3 and are the default choices.

It has a patched 2.6.11 kernel, back in the days when IO/CPU
performance was really good.

It's out of date and I am preparing a new one, also with reiser4
support. But IO performance nowadays is not so good. I am using
2.6.15-archck4.

Maybe things will be better in 2.6.16 .. I also had problems with grub
starting with 2.6.15 , so I switched to lilo. But I had problems with
that too, ( which I described on this mailing list a few days ago ).
So now I am using a 50Mb ext2 boot partition.

I hope reiser4 "rises" back to expectations again. Thank you :P

Re: Reiser4 default in Underground Dekstop distribution

[Hans Reiser]

Islam Amer wrote:

>Hi my livecd phaeronix http://www.phaeronix.net supports reiser4 and
>resier3 and are the default choices.
>
>It has a patched 2.6.11 kernel, back in the days when IO/CPU
>performance was really good.
>
>It's out of date and I am preparing a new one, also with reiser4
>support. But IO performance nowadays is not so good.
>
Are you referring specifically to reiser4 IO performance?  Can you give
me reproduceable specifics so that we can fix it? 

Thanks,

Hans

> I am using
>2.6.15-archck4.
>
>Maybe things will be better in 2.6.16 .. I also had problems with grub
>starting with 2.6.15 , so I switched to lilo. But I had problems with
>that too, ( which I described on this mailing list a few days ago ).
>So now I am using a 50Mb ext2 boot partition.
>
>I hope reiser4 "rises" back to expectations again. Thank you :P
>
>
>  
>