[NTLUG:Discuss] Time to switch away from ReiserFS?

[Chris Cox]

Leroy Tennison wrote:
...
> 
> Hope this doesn't open a can of worms but, what is it about reiserfs
> that makes it suitable for true enterprise deployment where no other
> file system is?

It's about the only filesystem that can be dynamically resized
online in EVERY situation (and QUICKLY).  Very fast filesystem
creates even on very large filesytems.  Handles directories with
tons of files very well.  Doesn't fragment much (most I've ever
seen is about 9%... I've seen double that with ext3).

XFS is usually growable... but can't be shrunk (not that you
need to shrink a filesystem that often... just a nit).  There
was a fairly recent bug involving stack sizes in the kernel,
XFS and LVM2.... I think those issues have been resolved.

We've been running two NAS'd home directory areas of 800G
each on top of reiserfs for about 7 years.  We have other
reiserfs filesystems of even greater size used in our
disk to disk backup, some of which might be several years
old (but in general, a lot of that changed as we moved
to different storage devices).

I have ext3 filesystems that exhibit behavior that is
UNEXPLAINED.  Yes... they are trashed.  In particular
it was a RHEL 4 machine.  There are directories where
you can't create files at a certain depth or lower... but
you can create files in other trees with equal depth
on the exact same filesystem (bizarre).  Filesystem
passes fsck.



> 
> While we are on the subject, from what I've heard ext3 journals both
> metadata and data while the other file systems don't.  Why is this?

It's an option... and it's an option on reiserfs on any relatively
modern distro (data=ordered (default, same as ext3 default), data=writeback
(just metadata like old reiserfs), data=journal (full data journaling)).

There was a time when reiserfs did only metadata journaling and
it wasn't ordered journaling... that one was fixed a few years back.
The journal (full data journaling) option is relatively
new.

Remember that enterprise commercial journaled filesystems often just
do metadata journaling (like old resierfs, XFS and JFS).





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