Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org regarding reiser4 inclusion

Nate Diller
2006-07-31T22:57:04Z

On 7/31/06, Jeff V. Merkey <jmerkey@wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>
> > On 7/31/06, Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:
> >
> >> Its well accepted that reiserfs3 has some robustness problems in the
> >> face of physical media errors. The structure of the file system and the
> >> tree basis make it very hard to avoid such problems. XFS appears to have
> >> managed to achieve both robustness and better data structures.
> >>
> >> How reiser4 compares I've no idea.
> >
> >
> > Citation?
> >
> > I ask because your clam differs from the only detailed research that
> > I'm aware of on the subject[1]. In figure 2 of the iron filesystems
> > paper that Ext3 is show to ignore a great number of data-loss inducing
> > failure conditions that Reiser3 detects an panics under.
> >
> > Are you sure that you aren't commenting on cases where Reiser3 alerts
> > the user to a critical data condition (via a panic) which leads to a
> > trouble report while ext3 ignores the problem which suppresses the
> > trouble report from the user?
> >
> > *1) http://www.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/iron-sosp05.pdf
>
> Hi Gregory, Wikimedia Foundation and LKML?
>
> How's Wikimania going. :-)
>
> What he says is correct. I have seen some serious issues with reiserfs
> in terms of stability and
> data corruption. Resier is however FASTER, but the statement is has
> robustness issues is accurate.
> I was using reiserfs but we opted to make EXT3 the default for Solera
> appliances, even when using Suse 10
> due to issues I have seen with data corruption and hard hangs on RAID 0
> read/write sector errors. I have
> stopped using it for local drives and based everything on EXT3. Not to
> say it won't get there eventually, but
> file systems have to endure a lot of time in the field and deployment
> befor they are ready for prime time.
>
> The Wikimedia appliances use Wolf Mountain, and I've tested it for about
> 4 months with few problems, but
> I only use it for hosting the Cherokee Langauge Wikipedia. It's
> performance is several magnitudes better
> than either EXT3 or ReiserFS. Despite this, for vertical wiki servers,
> its ok to go out with, folks can specifiy
> whether they want appliances with EXT3, Reiser, or WMFS, but iit's a
> long way from being "cooked"
> completely, though it does scale to 1 exabyte FS images.

i've seen you mention the Wolf Mountain FS in other emails, but google
isn't telling me a lot about it. Do you have a whitepaper? are there
any published benchmark results? what sort of workloads do you
benchmark?

NATE