reiser4 questions

[souln0thing]

Ok after having boot issues on my sda, hard drive and trying every kernel source there is genkernel and hand configured, im going to try reiser 4 on my ide hard drive. What i want to know is a few things

1:. I have pretty much a full setup gentoo on my sda hard drive on reiserfs. What do i have to do to get it over, without errors. Meaning i just tried copying over the data like this. Extract a stage 3 tarball, on the new partition, copy over the old data, and i got problems with portage/emerge permission issues(by the way the command i used was #cp -r -v /mnt/gentoo/* /mnt/gentoo64). Essentialy is there a special trick to copying one gentoo from one partition to another, or should I recompile everything, please no.
2: Kernel patch or not, i currently and have used the gentoo sources, i havent noticed much difference with the ck kernel. I configure the kernels myself, and i find them to be plenty fast. If i just use vanilla or gentoo sources what patches do i apply. (If you advise patch please explain so i tried applying patches and it didnt seem to do anything). Also any special configuration tips i should know of. The primary purpose of the computer will be gaming, audio, and learning development stuff.
3: Bootloader does grub require a special patch (again please give commands to use)

I might have some more questions, thats it for now i figured out my partitioning scheme already, thanks in advance.[/code]

[allanw]

I've been doing this to copy over root filesystems.
-a preserves permissions
-u only copies new modified files
-v verbose (prints the files)
-f force
-g prints a progress bar for big files
-x stay on one file system

This way it doesn't try to copy /dev or /proc and mess up.

cp -auvfgx / /mnt/gentoo

[mr.ed]

Hey souln0thing,

In regard to your questions bout grub and kernel, i think i might be able to help u out. First things first of course, u asked if it's possible to use vanilla or gentoo-sources patched with reiser4. Well it is! Look at this url: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-295168-postdays-0-postorder-asc-highlight-reiser4-start-0.html
In the last page there's an ebuild, which u can copy to your portage overlay and u can use for gentoo-sources. If u want the sole patch from namesys, here's the place to go: ftp://ftp.namesys.com/pub/.

I myself use a modified ebuild, which pulls in the latest patches from gentoo (all i did though, was modifying the ebuild's patchset number). And if the reiser4 patch is updated, all u have to do is change that number in the ebuild ;-P. It works like a charm, been using it for over a month now!

As for reiser4 on boot: why would u want to do that? Ask yourself this: is my boottime drastically lower with reiser4 on boot? The answer is no. U can patch grub for reiser4 off course, but it's really unstable and if something goes wrong... U do the math! I personally do not even mount my boot partition on boot, it only gets mounted when backing up my system.

Hope this'll help u out a bit further.

Greetz, Mr-Ed


P.s.: Some info to show it works... System uname: 2.6.11-reiser4-r8 x86_64 Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.20GHz
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[tomk]

Moved from Gentoo on AMD64
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[mr.ed]

Hehehe lol... could have been expected
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(Ex-Pornstar)

[souln0thing]

For the boot partition, personally i never had any luck with the boot partition setup. I just keep all the kernels on my / filesystem, in the boot folder. Oh well ill just redo my partitioning scheme. Thanks for the responses. And reiser4 is pretty fast i notice a dramatic increase with portage in a chroot environment.

[Gentree]

It's not a question of luck using a /boot partition , it is pretty universal practice. If it does not work you should work out what you are doing wrong.

As explained above , I see not reason to use anything other than ext3 for /boot.

Using cp -a works perfectly to copy across a partition. Use man cp to find out what it means.

I use R4 for portage and point my portage_tmpdir to somewhere on that partition as well rather than /var/tmp .

I can see useful, measurable improvements in speed which is nice but I would not say "dramatic".


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Gentoo because I'm a masochist
AthlonXP-M on A7N8X. Portage ~x86

[freelight]

Regarding the kernels, you will need a properly patched kernel if you would like to use Reiser4. You can use mm-sources (emerge mm-sources), or one of the unofficial patchsets here in Gentoo Forums->Unsuppertoed Software (such as nitro-sources). The instructions for installing the unofficial patcshet should be in the corresponding thread. Make sure that when you do make menuconfig, you enable reiser4 support.
As for /boot, there really is no reason to put reiser4 on it. It will be a hassle to manually patch and recompile grub, and there really are no benefits. Leave your /boot partition on ext3.
The copy command has been covered above, try what has been suggested, it will work. Altertanively, you can archive your entire drive into a tarball, extract it to the new (reiser4) partition, and keep a backup of the tarball somewhere safe. The commands:
tar cvjf /oldroot/* gentoo.tar.bz2
tar xvjf gentoo.tar.bz2 /reiser4root/
Be sure to back up your important data. Reiser4 can be unpredictable. It's a wild animal that hasn't been tamed yet, and sometimes it bites.
Naturally, you will need a reiser4-enabled LiveCD to do all this. Good luck.

[Gentree]

[vipernicus]

Take your hard drive out and beat it with a hammer. This is the same effect as patching your kernel with reiser4 and using it as your main filesystem.
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[SysOP XXL]

[Jake]

SysOP XXL, did you attempt to track down the source of your problem? Namesys currently has surprisingly few people who actually submit useful bug reports.

Regarding the integrity of the FS, I think everyone should keep backups. reiser4 has worked for me on multiple machines for well over a year without data loss, except on AMD64 when I knew there was a bug, and I was specifically trying to crash and lose data on a test partition. That bug has been fixed and I'm confident enough to keep some non-backed-up data on reiser4. Everything I really care about, however, gets backed up to a DragonFlyBSD machine. That way if I get my Gentoo installation into an unfixable state, suffer a stray rm -rf, have a hard drive die, or find a reiser4 bug, my important data is safe. Interestingly enough, of those previously mentioned ways to screw up a system, FS corruption is the only one I haven't dealt with, although I had a few close calls with XFS.

[SysOP XXL]

I have to admit I haven't studied the inner workings of the Reiser4 filesystem, nor have I even tried to debug. After that crash I tried to recover my system with all my might, and not even thought of writing every line down. Sorry.
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[Jake]

[SysOP XXL]