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Post subject: ReiserFS vs. ext3 - Official sidux Recommendation
 Posted: Feb 01, 2007 - 09:17 PM
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Joined: Dec 04, 2006
Posts: 136
Status: Offline
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A few weeks ago, I tried to migrate my existing sidux installation on a reiser partition to a different hd with an ext3 partition, and had a lot of problems. I posted initially about this under the installation section, and "fixed" my system, at least temporarily, but I'm concerned about this issue.
Here's the issue as I see it. Reiser is not being developed further, so it's recommended to use ext3 for sidux. Many users are presently using reiser. When the final sidux iso is posted, how will users transition to it? If we do a clean install on an ext3 partition, no problem. However, that will require reconfiguring and installing apps from our previous kanotix/sidux systems. On the other hand, an "upgrade-install" will require (imo) staying with the reiser fs. Making a new ext3 partition and "moving" to it with an upgrade-install will be very problematic; at least that's my experience.
I was never able to cleanly move my system from reiser to ext3. If anyone has been successful in doing this, I'd like to hear about it.
On irc, I heard different opinions about which fs to use. Some are staying with reiser, saying it isn't broken and will be around for a long time. Others are going to ext3. For those who plan to move from reiser to ext3, how do you plan to do it?
Regards,
feffer |
_________________
To whom much is given, much shall be required.
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Post subject: RE: Problem moving from reiser to ext3
Posted: Feb 01, 2007 - 09:33 PM
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Joined: Nov 28, 2006
Posts: 4277
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This interview is fairly revealing to me. Now I don't know how true or false the statements Hans Reiser makes here, but if they are more or less true, then that's not promising: http://kerneltrap.org/node/5654
Quote:
Jeremy Andrews: How much effort does Namesys have to put into the support of Reiser3?
Hans Reiser: We didn't start V4 until V3 was stable. After we started V4 we hired one guy to do most of the V3 bug fixes, which were mostly in the newer journaling code, and then after a year the bug reports mostly stopped coming in. The bugs that do get reported now are always in the new features added by the SuSE guys. I am a big believer in the let there be a stable branch of the code with no new features model of software development. This makes me a bit of a heretic in the lkml community, but oh well.
If this is essentially true, and if SUSE is now only in basic bug fix mode, that's not promising at all.
However, users have other options, you can change all your data partitions to ext3 fairly easily, just backup, reformat, change fstab, restore.
For root, I also would like to see if this question has an answer, for now I am retaining existing root as reiserfs, but all new installs, and all older reiserfs formatted data stuff I am switching to ext3
If it's true that reiserfs was basically stable like Hans says, and that suse fixes and updates destabilized it, and now suse is dropping active development, that's another pretty major black mark against suse/novell in my opinion.
However, you also can't help but note that suse dropped active development AFTER reiser's wife was murdered, but not before it became clear that Hans was the top suspect. So anyone who wants to believe that there was no connection is making novell public relations people happy. |
_________________
sidux Maintenance script: dist-upgrade, kernel install, general utilities: smxi
Backup script [using rdiff-backup]: rd-h2.sh
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Post subject: RE: Problem moving from reiser to ext3
Posted: Feb 02, 2007 - 02:23 AM
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Joined: Nov 25, 2006
Posts: 2555
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While technically correct, this perception doesn't represent the actual state of affairs. True is that Namesys put reiserfs 3.6 into a strict feature freeze/ deep maintenance mode in favour of the upcoming (still not ready for prime time and not backwards compatible) reiser4 a few years ago - at that stage it dealt better with lots of small files than concurrent filesystem at that time, at least regarding speed that statement isn't true anymore with other filesystems improving and reiserfs stagnating. SuSE delayed that stagnation to actually meet the needs of contemporary use cases with its own developers (until the end of 2006 up to 3 developers almost exclusively for reiserfs 3.6 development), ACLs, xattrs, proper quota support, online resizing are still missing from reiserfs 3.6 completely. These changes (basically leading to a compatible reiserfs 3.6.1 or something like that) introduced regressions like any other developments and SuSE tried to fix them as they got noticed.
Right now with harddisks getting larger, xattrs and quotas becoming more important, clustering becoming a serious need, the old reiserfs 3.6 code isn't easy to keep on par any longer while concurrent file systems handle these issues easily while keeping up-/ and backwards compatibility, performance and journalling stability isn't an advantage for reiserfs any more because other filesystems were able to catch up and even overtake reiserfs 3.6 in the mean time (reiser4 is a complete new and incompatible filesystem, not a natural successor that could be upgraded - fragmentation and stability issues are also quite nasty). For these reasons Novell/ SuSE decided to follow Namesys' lead and cease all efforts regarding future development of reiserfs 3.6 and to switch to ext3/ ext4 while promising to provide further (deep) maintenance, as they're required to do for their existing (enterprise) user base anyways.
In my opinion it is sad that all further development of reiserfs 3.6 has been halted, because the b-tree approach and leaf packing had undeniable advantages for performance and overhead regarding lots of small files - but it also limited further development of the on-disk format as well. What is to be expected for reiserfs 3.6 in the future, SuSE will most likely look after serious bugs in reiserfs for the foreseable future, but personally I won't trust my data to a file system without active (!= deep) maintenance and that neglection is already showing in some rather serious bugs in reiserfs still present kernel 2.6.19 and 2.6.20, besides that alternative filesystems are also getting better than the current state of affairs for reiserfs 3.6 regarding stability and performance because those are still actively developed and not static targets without any improvements. This means that I don't consider reiserfs 3.6 a decent choice for "newly created" filesystems, but transitioning existing filesystems might not be a prime priority either - reiserfs is still there and won't go away in the next 5+ years<fullstop>.
If you want to transition away from reiserfs, "cp -a", "rsync -a", "tar -cjf" and subsequent "mkfs -t <insert_your_filesystem_of_choice_here>" (rather easy with external USB/ firewire/ eS-ATA disks or free space on different partitions) are the weapons of choice.
Post scriptum:
- please read http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2006-09/msg00542.html and subsequent clarifications regarding SuSE's point of view.
- reiser4 is a completely different filesystem and incompatible to reiserfs 3.6; up- or downgrades are not possible at all, therefore its development is as unrelated to these issues/ discussions as ext4, xfs, jfx, ufs2, zfs, ntfs/ hpfs, vfat would be.
- I'd recommend ext3 for new general purpose filesystems.
- XFS is a strong contendor for special purposes and those who really know how to deal with it (backup power is almost a requirement, because it doesn't like power outtages, / on XFS is "difficult" at best, performance for dealing with large file trees has been negatively affected in recent kernel versions - performance fixes will enter 2.6.21).
- jfs has its niche
- ext4 will become a contendor in roughly half a year (easy upgrades are possible without special efforts - this is the advantage of an actively maintained and extensible filesystem).
- (yes, I personally don't use reiserfs anymore, for exactly these technical concerns) |
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Post subject: RE: Problem moving from reiser to ext3
Posted: Feb 02, 2007 - 03:38 AM
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Joined: Dec 01, 2006
Posts: 748
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| slh, wow, you should write a book. Very informative post, thanks! |
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"Cool was never cool until the cool guys at Cool industries developed a cool new product: Cool."
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Post subject: RE: Problem moving from reiser to ext3
Posted: Feb 02, 2007 - 04:25 PM
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Team Member
Joined: Nov 27, 2006
Posts: 1959
Location: underworld
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Thanks slh, good post, I myself will continue to run reiserfs till ext4 comes out and is stable enough or reiserfs does some damage. I personally never liked ext3  I also don't have anything to lose, so, if ya all want stable reiser might not be for you |
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Can God be sued for not putting DRM into DNA of people letting them infringe copyright ?
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Post subject: RE: Problem moving from reiser to ext3
Posted: Feb 02, 2007 - 05:12 PM
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Joined: Dec 01, 2006
Posts: 481
Location: NYC/NJ Shore area
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Same here,reiserfs for my needs have never been a problem since it came out.
I will stick until something better comes along........safe and working.
Thanks for the info. |
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Post subject: RE: Problem moving from reiser to ext3
Posted: Feb 02, 2007 - 05:32 PM
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Joined: Nov 30, 2006
Posts: 3434
Location: Budapest
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slh,
thank you very much for this deep insight. So I will keep my strategy: keeping my reiserfs filesystems, but not creating new ones.
hubi |
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Bonitas stultitiaque sodales sunt.
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Post subject: RE: Problem moving from reiser to ext3
Posted: Feb 02, 2007 - 06:15 PM
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Joined: Nov 30, 2006
Posts: 773
Location: Germany
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Post subject: RE: Problem moving from reiser to ext3
Posted: Feb 02, 2007 - 07:41 PM
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Joined: Dec 01, 2006
Posts: 445
Location: Berlin
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Thanks slh. That post should find its way into the wiki.
Gruß
oduffo |
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Post subject:
Posted: Feb 02, 2007 - 08:18 PM
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Joined: Dec 03, 2006
Posts: 288
Location: Europe
Status: Offline
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Ext3 has three different journaling modes called "write-back", "ordered" and "full". I have found the following link:
http://www.redhat.com/support/wpapers/redhat/ext3/
but I don't quite understand it, seen from a pratical perpective
What is sidux' default journaling mode? Maybe someone can explain the differences between the settings. I used to have the "ordered" data mode on my Kanotix install. |
_________________
"La liberté, c'est de pouvoir choisir celui dont on sera l'esclave." (J. Moreau)
sidux64/nyx - Opteron 170, 2 Gb RAM, nForce 630a
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Post subject: Re: RE: Problem moving from reiser to ext3
Posted: Feb 05, 2007 - 05:01 AM
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Joined: Dec 17, 2006
Posts: 44
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| I am going to keep my current sidux partition formated with reiserfs but in the future with new installs I will no longer use it. and slh thank you for the very informative post |
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Post subject: RE: Re: RE: Problem moving from reiser to ext3
Posted: Jul 01, 2007 - 04:57 PM
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Joined: Jun 06, 2007
Posts: 27
Location: Canada
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Im happy to admit that I'm in the XFS niche. I have read about people complaining about power failures and bad experiences, so since I was such a fan of using XFS for just over a month, i decided to do my own testing with "power failures" 
Disk layout
*not tested* sda1=120MB ext2 for /boot
*not tested* sda2=~8GB swap
sda3=~30GB xfs for /
sda4=~165GB xfs for /home
*not tested* sda5=~10GB ntfs for /media/windows 
*not tested* sdb1=~700GB external usb2 xfs for /media/seagate (brand spanking new Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750gig external, unfortunately only actually 700GB 
*Tests included were all done on an install i was planning to reinstall over anyway*
Pulling plug=no problems in xfs_check or xfs_repair
switching switch=no problems in xfs_check or xfs_repair
holding power button=no problems in xfs_check or xfs_repair
pulling plug during apt-get dist-upgrade /sm=no problems in xfs_check or xfs_repair, booted perfectly, and the xfs_check only took about 1.5 minutes for 15 GB of data on root and 2.5 minutes for 80 GB on /home!!
so from those actual attempts at corrupting and hosing an XFS partition, my attempts were absolutely futile, lol. Can anyone suggest any power interruption test that could maybe help harm the log/journal/inodes?? Id love to try and actually corrupt it sometime
I use XFS with a 128 MB log, with the fstab options of noatime,nodiratim,attr2,logbufs=8
The XFS FS is insanely fast, it even wants to outperform the 203 GB Maxtor UDMA133 drive recently got
with a hdparm rate of between 60-70MB/s yes only using DMA100
Hope that helps some of you to consider sum XFS bliss |
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Post subject: RE: Re: RE: Problem moving from reiser to ext3
Posted: Jul 01, 2007 - 05:25 PM
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Joined: Nov 25, 2006
Posts: 2555
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I was in the xfs team as well...
hard facts:
- untarring the linux source takes 3 times as long as on ext3/ reiserfs 3.6
- deleting the unpacked source 5 times as long
- using kmail/ maildir on xfs browing through the lkml mailinglist archives becomes a pain
- xfs is not suitable for /, without an extra /boot/ partition (grub in partition doesn't work at all due to the xfs design, grub in mbr doesn't work reliably on all systems)
- 9 systems were migrated over to xfs, 4 months later xfs has failed/ lost data on every single one of them - only 2 of those were exposed to power failures at all (one of them shortly after dist-upgrading, total system crash).
These test were sampled between kernel 2.6.12 and 2.6.20, including fresh installs with pretty much every kernel inbetween - I'm excluding the experiences with kernel 2.6.15 above, which shredded each filesystem it was exposed to. Among the sample group 32 bit and 64 bit systems of all ages, ranging from an Athlon 600 MHz up to an AMD64 4200+. The only fs that behaved worse in my tests was reiser4, neither reiserfs 3.6 nor ext3 ever showed any issues.
Because reiserfs 3.6 is not being developed any further, the only recommendation can be ext3. |
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Post subject:
Posted: Jul 12, 2007 - 03:46 AM
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Joined: Jul 05, 2007
Posts: 18
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Some very excellent information in this thread. I would like to add that from personal experience it takes longer to mount reiserfs during boot up that other filesystems such as ext3, xfs, jfs. Also, I think the "show features" dialog from gparted has some useful info:
As we can see, xfs cannot be shrunk and jfs cannot be grown or shrunk. I see that not much is spoken about jfs. From what I've read, it uses the very little cpu usage during heavy operations. Anyway, here is the Wikipedia pages for all these filesystems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFS_file_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFSi/XFS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReiserFS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4
One good thing about ext3 is that when ext4 becomes mainstream, all it takes is to mount your current ext3 partitions as ext4 and voila, new benefits galore.
Also, here is an old benchmark for ext4:
http://www.linuxinsight.com/first_benchmarks_of_the_ext4_file_system.html
Definitely an improvement over ext3. |
Last edited by SaberBlaze on Jul 12, 2007 - 04:30 AM; edited 1 time in total
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Post subject:
Posted: Jul 12, 2007 - 04:04 AM
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Joined: Nov 28, 2006
Posts: 4277
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| good posting, I believe however that the gparted information is not information about the systems themselves, but rather about what operations gparted supports for those file systems. I'm not positive, but I think that's what it is. |
_________________
sidux Maintenance script: dist-upgrade, kernel install, general utilities: smxi
Backup script [using rdiff-backup]: rd-h2.sh
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