On Monday 23 May 2005 20:58, Dan Hollis goemon@anime.net wrote:
On Mon, 23 May 2005, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
If you want to use reiserfs, by all means be my guest. Some people only think they have performance gains with it, others really do. Reiserfs in fedora tends to be "lightly tested" at best though, so make sure you test it hard yourself before going into production.
For us its not a question of 'only thinking'. We actually tested it and got clear performance wins.
We tested ext3, jfs, xfs, and reiserfs.
For us reiserfs is the clear winner for ISP workloads.
Does it work correctly as a root file system?
The following extract from reiserfsck(8) indicates that it won't:
--rebuild-tree This option rebuilds the entire filesystem tree using leaf nodes found on the device. Normally you only need this option if the reiserfsck --check reports "Running with --rebuild-tree is required". You are strongly encouraged to make a backup copy of the whole partition before attempting the --rebuild-tree option. Once reiserfsck --rebuild-tree is started it must finish its work (and you should not interrupt it), otherwise the filesystem will be left in the unmountable state to avoid subsequent data corruptions.
Our reiserfs results interested a business partner of ours who used to swear by ext3. They also found out reiserfs was better all round for them so they are also switching.
Unless of course they want to do some common file system recovery options such as putting an image of a file system on another file system. The last reports were that if you put a Reiser3 image as a regular file in a Reiser3 file system then fsck would really mess things up.
The only real caveat for reiserfs at the moment is the lack of selinux support.
How is it lacking? In a quick test it seems to work.