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: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:
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.