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

Chris Cox cjcox at acm.org
Fri Jul 11 01:15:37 CDT 2008


Robert Pearson wrote:
...
> 
> It's kind of lonely over here in the "Waiting for ZFS" line. Anybody
> want to join?

You want a slow filesystem?  Look.. Sun's volume management was
utter CRAP.  So... they developed a new combo filesystem volume
manager... great... welcome to this century... thank you very
much Sun.  However, I know for a fact that the performance of
ZFS in a non-RAID configuration is much slower than UFS (and UFS
is REALLY slow folks).

Sun's gains are realized ONLY in a software RAID configuration.
And Sun has made it clear that the ONLY RAID they like is
software RAID (and that being ZFS).  ZFS isn't bug free, and because
of how booting works on Sun boxes, it requires a rework of the
OBP in order be bootable there.

I'm not saying that ZFS isn't special.. it is.  But it's not
all what Sun makes it out to be (they're exaggerating... similar
to how they promote dtrace).

> 
> XFS was the finest (and fastest point to point) file system I had ever
> seen in the late 1990's. SGI was on a power roll.
> Then the bottom fell out. I don't expect XFS to ever be a top player
> again. Hasta la vista, baby.
> Then in 1998 at the Mass Storage Conference I saw GFS (Global File
> System) co-developed by Sandia and ???(SGI).
> The first Storage aware and centric file system. It suffered a fate
> worse than death.
> I had hoped for a GFS resurgence when Red Hat bought it from Sistina.
> Not to happen. Apparently it is a "point product" solution in the Red
> hat arsenal. Good approach. File systems are "point product" solutions
> rather than "one size fits all" as they are commonly used.

openGFS and GFS2 should be getting placed into the kernel if not already... I think
you'll see openGFS for the masses already.

> 
> I stopped using ReiserFS when openSUSE no longer had it as the
> default. I've had problems with all of them in Linux and I am not a
> power user. I had never used ext2 or ext3 until then. Now everything I
> have is ext3 and sometimes I have to fight to get the OS to install
> that. Damndest thing I ever saw.  It keeps defaulting to ext2? I have
> heard encouraging comments about ext4. We'll see...

Ext4's big feature is Extents (<small font> hooray </small font>)

> Actually I am trying to learn how to use LVM and ext3 or just LVM.
> I am very LVM challenged. I don't find it intuitive at all. People
> look at me funny when I say that. My reason for saying that is that
> Fedora once, during an install when I requested LVM, made the whole
> disk a PV and then it either created multiple VGs or multiple LVs in
> lieu of partitions. I had to low-level format that drive with the
> manufacturers tool to reuse it. Neither Linux "fdisk" (reported no
> partitions) nor LVM (reported no PVs, VGs or LVs) could do a thing
> with it. Fedora would install to it.

Did you read the article on LVM at NTLUG?





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