[NCLUG] ext3 versus ReiserFS?

Eric Brunson brunson at level3.net
Wed Oct 24 13:26:47 MDT 2001


* J. Paul Reed (preed at sigkill.com) [011024 13:09]:
> On Wed, 24 Oct 2001 quent at pobox.com wrote:
> 
> > With the Redhat 7.2 announcement I've been wondering what people think
> > about the use of ext3 versus reiserfs. I've used neither but have heard
> > good things about reiserfs from people using it.
> 
> I've heard various things about both.
> 
> One thing that makes me a bit skiddish about installing ReiserFS is I've
> seen a number of posts on the kernel mailing list (and granted, this was
> awhile ago when I was actively reading Kernel Traffic) where Hans Reiser
> would post a message to the effect of "Oops... there's a really bad bug
> where if you do a, then b, then c (where operations a, b, and c are quite
> common), you will lose your entire partition. But, we have a patch. To
> install this patch, you have to reformat."
> 
> For awhile, the ReiserFS folks were mucking around all the time with the
> superblock format (or whatever Reiser calls it)... which from a
> usability/support standpoint, could be a real pain in the ass.

I'm sure I'm not the only one on the list old enough to remember the
hell of ext2 in kernel <.97 am I?  Every new thing has it's growing
pains, but reiser seems to have come a long way recently.  I've been
using reiser on six machines since KRUD came out with support for
installing on it and I've been very pleased.  Four of the machines are
laptops and I never worry about letting the battery die on them any
more, because I know they'll boot right back up without having to
fsck.

I've only had one problem, but since a warm boot failed to fix it, but
a cold boot did, I think it was a hardware issue rather than a
filesystem issue.

So, I have no basis for comparison since I haven't used ext3, but
after several posts concerned with the stability of reiser, I thought
I post something in support of it.

The only downside to running reiser that I've come across so far is
none of the rescue kits seem to grok reiser, so I always have to find
a KRUD disk *and* an update floppy to boot off something other than my
reiser partition.  Is there any way to obviate the need for the
floppy?

I haven't seen any mention of speed comparisons or support for large
directory TOCs in ext3 (reiser does that really well) which I'm very
interested in.

-- 
 Eric Brunson   brunson at level3.net   page-eric at level3.net  
tcA thgirypoC muinelliM latigiD eht detaloiv tsuj evah uoY



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