Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 3rd Oct 2006 18:50 UTC
OpenSUSE 10.2 will no longer user ReiserFS as its default filesystem. "We've been using ReiserFS as our default installation file system for the last 6-7 years now, and it's served us well in that time. Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with it, some purely technical, some more related to maintenance. I'll outline a few of the larger issues and offer my solution as a conclusion."
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Member since:
2005-07-08
Maybe ReiserFS get's a new chance when Reiser4 becomes (finally) available in the vanilla kernel.
Personally I doubt it. As I see it, SUSE has pretty much NO CHOICE and I doubt they'll back up hans again...IMHO:
- Multicore machines are there, even a normal server can have or will have soon 2,4,8 cores. And this is a short term prediction, in a few years it'll be 16, 32...
- Reiser3 has know smp scalability problems. Because multicore machines need it, they need a scalable FS NOW. Making reiser scalable would take time, resources, and it'd make reiser very unstable for some time. Aditionally they use beagle, and they may consider to switch to selinux in the future - they need a good extend attributes implementation
- Reiser3 would be scalable if hans reiser had wasted all this years into making it scalable and adding extend attributes
- Instead of doing that, hans dumped all his resources into reiser4. Reiser 4 will take years to stabilize and be usable in enterprises, regardless of if it's included in the kernel or not and regardless of the engineers you dump on it.
- To make it worse, Hans stopped maintaining reiser3 and flamewared suse when they tried to add features to reiser3. In his opinion, people should "switch to reiser4 now" instead of wasting time adding features to reiser3. This, BTW, made kernel hackers angry. They were left with a filesystem with know problems (reiser3 behaviour with broken hardware is not reasonable) and without maintainers, and users reporting bugs that were fixed by suse but may not get fixed in the future now that suse isn't there. Don't get surprised when people doesn't have warm feelings when reiser asks to include reiser4 in the main tree.
- In other words, hans reiser has created not one, but TWO filesystems that just can NOT be used by serious distributions, even if they want. Reiser 3 has know serious problems that can't be solved easily and lacks good implementation of neccesary features. And the answer from hans to those problems is..."use reiser4".
- Consider the alternatives. ext3 has reasonable smp scalability, a good xattr implementation, great behaviour in the case of hardware errors, and all of this is stable, not experimental. Additionally, the developers behave like real engineers and care about fixing real problems in real systems. Ext3 is not the best filesystem on eart but it's usable for enterprise and ext4 has a reasonable development plan
- Considering all these points, would you seriously put your enterprise distro in the hands of Hans Reiser?
Edited 2006-10-03 22:16