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:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-11-11
Member since:2005-07-06
...but ReiserFS kept destroying my data while ext3 never failed once. So I'd say ext3 is way beyond relatively safe.
You hear various stories like this from people about all filesystems - ext3 destroyed my data, Reiser destroyed my data, XFS destroyed my data....... They're utterly meaningless.
They're generally made by people who get paranoid about what happens if they have a power failure, and they pull the power cord on their machine to test it and whinge when it doesn't come back up. Such comments don't apply.
Member since:2006-07-13
We also have had quite a few bad issues with reiserfs and we decided now to use ext3 instead. Since then, we haven't seen that kind of numbers of failures.
To us, it was not 'meaningless' - really reiserfs was not useable in our cases.
Similar reports were discussed some time ago with someone who worked for a large european aviation carrier that run linux for some large scale databases. He asked me what I thought of it -- told our damaged data and he said "pheww, we're not the only ones who experience this".
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
Member since:2005-07-06
reiserfs v. 3.6 have principial "bugs ?" that cannot be solved w/o disk format change, so Hans stop to develop 3.6 and create reiser4. Sure, all reiser4 bashers knows this fact. So why to continue spreading lie about "Hans laziness to support and patching reiser 3.6". It fixed, continued and supported. In reiser4.
Member since:2005-07-06
Now the switch is made to the relatively safe ext3. That's a good decision too.
It's a step backwards to be honest, and a sad day for Linux filesystems, certainly for Linux desktop systems. ext3 is a good and reasonably safe filesystem in a server, especially on partitions where not much is happening, while switching to something like XFS for larger partitions for things like serious file serving.
However, ext3 is truly awful on systems used as fileservers and desktop systems where lots of small, or large, files are being accessed. It also creates a crapload more disk activity than any other filesystem I've seen - it's almost pretty scary hearing the drives really go. Watch that LED flash on start up as you wait, and wait for your desktop to boot. ext3 also likes to eat disk space no end.
Oh, and if you want to run a something like a VMware Server, for your own sake put it on a Reiser, or better yet, an XFS filesystem. ext3 will absolutely kill your performance and your hard drive. Alas, JFS is a good filesystem but doesn't seem to have much support strangely.
You can almost feel Andrew Morton's pretty clear disappointment on the Linux mailing lists when people talk about extending an already dated filesystem in ext3 for ext4, where he feels Linux deserves a much more modern filesystem where it can really take a lead. Reiser4 may be it, but that seems bogged down completely in technicalities and politics on both sides.
Member since:2006-05-28
"Watch that LED flash on start up as you wait, and wait for your desktop to boot."
Since I moved away from reiser3 to ext3 my laptop starts up 5 seconds faster and generally seems quicker even when dealing with small files. However, my reasoning for moving was because I kept ending up with a corrupted file system with reiser3 - this has not been case with ext3 (touch wood).
Member since:
2006-01-31
In the past SUSE did the maintenance on ReiserFS themselves, but I think we can say that ReiserFS (3 that is) is 'end-of-life'.
Now the switch is made to the relatively safe ext3. That's a good decision too.
Maybe ReiserFS get's a new chance when Reiser4 becomes (finally) available in the vanilla kernel.