Re: reiserfs, xfs, ext2, ext3

Hans Reiser
2001-05-09T18:22:43Z

Alan Cox wrote:

> > that reiserfs has had lots of bugs, and is marked as experimental in kernel
> > 2.4.4. Not to mention that the people of RH discourage there users from using
> > it.
>
> At the time Red Hat 7.1 was mastered Reiserfs was not stable. The reiserfs in
> the RH kernel has some of the tail fixes but newer ones are not present. Also
> it had other problems then: the fsck tool was useless, it didnt work on
> big endian machines (eg PPC, S/390).
>
> If Hans sent me a patch removing the experimental tag from Reiserfs the only
> thing that would make me hesitate the slightest from applying it would be the
> endianness thing, and thats not enough to stop it being applied.

Jeff Mahoney has a patch in progress for this, he currently has the kernel code
working, but needs to do the utilities. I would hesitate to put the endianness
fixes in before 2.5.1 just because I am conservative about disturbing stable code.

There exists one known bug which one user has hit which required a major code
change to fix. We are now testing the code, and are in the ironic situation
of hesitating to merge in a bug fix out of fear that the bugfix code is large and
untested, and it might have bugs that more than one user will hit.:-/
I think we are going to make the new code an option until it has been
extensively tested.

I think that 2.4.4 is stable, and I say this based upon us getting lots of users
with
hardware bugs and none with bugs not fixed in 2.4.4 in the entire time since 2.4.4
was released.

>
>
> > There has also been lots of talks about reiserfs being the cause of some data
> > lose and performance lose (not sure about this last one).
>
> If you are running 2.4.4/2.4.4-ac/2.4.5pre I believe all the relevant reiserfs
> patches are applied. The new fsck seems to work a lot better too. The limiters
> right now are:
> - You need a patch for NFS (its on their site no big deal)
> - You can only use little endian boxes (x86 for you so ok)

you also need a patch for quotas.

>
> > I think that the data lose is not significant in a proxy cache, if the FS is
> > really fast, as is said reiserfs is.

you can ask nikita for a copy of reiserfs_raw, a version of reiserfs designed for
squid. It is substantially faster.

Hans