Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Ubuntu Developers Discuss Dropping ReiserFS

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #11
    Originally posted by Vim_User View Post
    Despite that the article mentions that the kernel module will not be dropped, even if it would be dropped only systems of administrators break that are dumb enough to upgrade without reading the release notes.
    No, the article mentions they're considering dropping the kernel module. Current discussions suggest they probably won't, but it's not set in stone.

    Comment


    • #12
      Drop .. no drop... it probably doesn't matter

      The fact is that everyone is encouraged to move away from reiserfs because it lacks a true maintainer as far as I know.

      For those that didn't trust reiserfs, I will say this, Jeff M. did a good job of making patches for SuSE/SUSE... and so it was really the only platform for reiserfs IMHO, but given it was the only enteprise distro with journaled filesystem and lvm for such a long time, etc., etc. The SUSE folks made reiserfs work and work even better by adding extended attributes and the like... good job. But alas, that support ended some time ago.

      Reiserfs is much more of a complex data structure written to disk and therefore bad sectors did tend to make things quite bad. But one could argue that a bad sector in the right place on ext3/4 does equally as bad things (could even be worse), it's just easier to hit a bad place with reiserfs. As long as the disks were good and you didn't cut power, reiserfs has been very stable. But again, on an distro (like Red Hat, for example) where there is disdain for the filesystem, sure... stay as far away from their implementation as possible (unpatched, uncared for, etc...).

      I've certainly seen my share of weird anomalies with ext2/3/4.... and at least with reiserfs, I could to a rebuildtree and usually get everything back... can't say the same for the others. But in all fairness to compare ext2/3/4 to reiserfs is very much apples to oranges. While a few nice features like extents made it in... those filesystems still show their ancient (and I mean that in a fuddy duddy way) roots.

      So... love reiserfs, hate reiserfs, the fact is, without good maintenance, it has to die... that's just the way it is. Sure, the kernel devs can keep it limping along, but eventually, it's going to rot.

      Who knows, maybe Reiser4 will be the "answer"?

      Comment


      • #13
        Originally posted by cjcox View Post
        Who knows, maybe Reiser4 will be the "answer"?
        Answer to what? It seems very unlikely to be even be merged upstream. Ext4 works fine for most users. XFS if you are using large amounts of data. Btrfs if you want more of the fancy features. Don't see much of a chance for anything els atm. I am interested in seeing where tuxfs goes however.

        Comment


        • #14
          I understand dropping it from the installer and even from grub and the default kernel image.
          But for backwards compatibility it should remain as an installable extra module. I still have old disks with reiserfs on them, and being able to plug them and have them work 5-10 years from now is an important feature.

          Comment


          • #15
            Originally posted by stevenc View Post
            ReiserFS (v3) on Linux served me faithfully for something like 10 years with acceptable perfromance and never losing a byte. Since the Big Kernel Lock changes after 2.6.32 it was made unstable and this still hasn't been fixed. And btrfs ate a server full of data the first and last time I tried it. So now to new old things: ZFS for me.
            Kconfig snippet for btrfs:

            Btrfs is highly experimental, and THE DISK FORMAT IS NOT YET
            FINALIZED. You should say N here unless you are interested in
            testing Btrfs with non-critical data.
            Yeah, that doesn't sound like something you should trust your data to. Not that I don't sympathize... we all want the shiny things (automatic integrity checks on read, nearly free snapshots, etc.). Although btrfs is rapidly getting better (heh!), IMO it's not yet ready for production use. (Especially if your production includes multiple disks.)

            Comment

            Working...
            X