[NCLUG] ext3 versus ReiserFS?

J. Paul Reed preed at sigkill.com
Wed Oct 24 12:47:00 MDT 2001


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 do know that Mandrake has been shipping with Reiser for some time now,
and I have a friend here in SLO that has been using it on his workstation
for a long time now (ca. 8 months?) ... no problem reported. I'm betting
that Mandrake has done some extra QA and is supporting a specific version
of ReiserFS.

The thing I really like about ext3 is that it's ext2+ (well... actually,
it's ext2++ ;-)

By that I mean: if, for some reason, the journal in ext3 gets horked,
you're not screwed. Standard ext2 fsck tools will work (or the standard
ext2 tools that come w/ the distro, rather), you just won't get the
performance benefit of lightning fast fscks.

I think ext3 is perfect for (and targetted for) people (like myself) who
have large ext2 installations, and who want the peace of mind that a bug in
the new file system isn't necessarily going to cause them to either a) lose
data, or b) have to reformat because of a superblock bug/format change, but
who still want the journaling happiness that ext3 provides.

I think it's quite nifty that you can switch from ext2 to ext3 (and back
again) by running a couple of commands as root... and, as a sysadmin who
has to support a stable filing system format for a large number of
machines, that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

> I'll probably try them out when I get that nifty rackmount box that
> William came up with :)

Mmm... new rackmount pr0n server^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H toy...

Later,
Paul
   ---------------------------------------------------------------------
   J. Paul Reed               preed at sigkill.com || web.sigkill.com/preed
   It's amazing what a little brain damage will do for your credibility.
                                              -- Leonard Shelby, Memento




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