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Ubuntu Developers Discuss Dropping ReiserFS

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  • Ubuntu Developers Discuss Dropping ReiserFS

    Phoronix: Ubuntu Developers Discuss Dropping ReiserFS

    Ubuntu developers are presently deciding what to do with support for the ReiserFS file-system, up to and including dropping kernel support for the aging but stable file-system...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    No good answers...

    The demise of reiserfs is a sad story. Here you have the first widespread used journaled fielsystem. It was for the longest time the only filesystem that work effeciently under LVM allowing ultrafast growing while online.

    If somebody asked me for an enterprise class filesystem, reiserfs would be on the short list....

    ... if it weren't for the fact that it's not being actively maintained by anyone.

    Hans was rude, crude and of course, a murderer... but in his madness there was certainly genius.

    Reiserfs (v3) you will be missed.

    Meanwhile, Linux filesystems have regressed... not saying that ext4 isn't "better" than ext3 in some ways, but it still doesn't resize quickly and I believe you still have the separate inode (out of inodes) problem. So, it's not reiserfs in those respects.

    My choice has been to use XFS, but again, it's not reiserfs either....

    I think the world is hoping for a "good" BTRFS, but that seems to still be a ways off...

    Losing reiserfs has hurt enterprise Linux... but it will recover....

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    • #3
      Originally posted by cjcox View Post
      ...

      Losing reiserfs has hurt enterprise Linux... but it will recover....
      I do not think ReiserFS was ever meant to be use for enterprises. ReiserFS is designed as a better filesystem for desktops than EXT3 at the time. EXT2, EXT3, EXT4 and XFS is meant for enterprises. When I used ReiserFS, it sometimes becomes unstable compared to other filesystems. I only use ReiserFS for junk data and video recordings because it too unstable and too unreliable to use it for the main setup.

      Probably, someone will take ReiserFS and create a fork of it. Hopefully ReiserFS can get better being stable and reliable when that person does do that.

      This bad new is only for people that use Ubuntu. The kernel developers still have it listed in the kernel. Until kernel developers completely gets rid of ReiserFS and Reiser4 support out of the kernel, users can still re-compile the kernel to include ReiserFS and Reiser4 support.

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      • #4
        Reiserfs

        I still use reiserfs v3 in production on my Desktops. My fileserver moved to XFS because I wanted a battle tested filesystem for my RAID setup. I dont like and will probably never trust ext2/ext3/ext4. I've been burnt too many times in the past by extfs instability. Sad day, I wish Ubuntu would go away from Linux. It used to be an ok system, but now I find that Ubuntu is too broken at handling upgrades and they are going down the crazy path of tablet desktops. 30" monitors will never work well with a UI designed for fingers.

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        • #5
          Reiserfs has some unique features that are really useful in some situations.
          One of this feature is tail merge that is really helpful when you have a huge number of small files and performance are not a big concern.
          I use reiserfs on the repository of BackupPC; the variable number of inode and the tail merge feature allows for packing a huge number of files and an even bigger number of physical links on a single filesystem without wasting space.
          In the past, when HR was arrested and reiser had an uncertain future, I tried to migrate a 100GB volume from reiserfs to ext3. It used more than 130GB of space when the copy failed for inode exaustion.
          The only linux filesystem that is comparable with reiserfs is btrfs, BUT it's not stable yet (even the disk format is subject to changes) and it's slower for many type of workload.
          Loosing reiserfs would be a big deal, at least until btrfs will become a mature fs.
          Last edited by zipman; 12 September 2013, 05:43 PM.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by tecknurd View Post
            Probably, someone will take ReiserFS and create a fork of it.
            They'd better change the name then. Maybe just to RFS or something like that. Otherwise, no matter how good it will get, it'll always be remembered as "the murderer's filesystem". There is such a thing as bad publicity...

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            • #7
              Stay in prison !

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              • #8
                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.
                Last edited by stevenc; 12 September 2013, 07:52 PM.

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                • #9
                  Drop kernel module? No way

                  I can understand dropping support in the installer, but they don't really have to do anything to support the kernel module as that's part of the upstream kernel. Dropping the kernel module will break systems that use ReiserFS when they apt-get dist-upgrade

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by gigaplex View Post
                    I can understand dropping support in the installer, but they don't really have to do anything to support the kernel module as that's part of the upstream kernel. Dropping the kernel module will break systems that use ReiserFS when they apt-get dist-upgrade
                    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.

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