ReiserFS vs Reiser4 [QUESTION]

MetalWarrior · Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2005 10:55 am Post subject: ReiserFS vs Reiser4 [QUESTION]

Hi,
can someone tell me what is the difference between ReiserFS and Reiser4? Can I use both of them under Gentoo? Excuse me if it is a stupid question, but I'm going to do a new Gentoo installation and I wanted to try reiserfs but I didn't know that there were two Reiser* File Systems.. Opinions about them?
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expat_iain · Guru Joined: 09 Jan 2004 Posts: 352 Location: Malta GC

Reiser4 is the latest filesystem from Hans Reiser. As this is still a young filesystem, you're better off using either reiserfs, ext3, xfs or jfs.

Regs.

Iain.

JoKo · Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2005 2:57 pm Post subject:

Reiser4 is indeed young and is not considered to be stable, but apart from that you are free to use whichever filesystem for your partitions. For instance, you could try out reiser4 on your home partition...

Moartel · Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2005 5:45 am Post subject:

MetalWarrior · Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2005 7:18 am Post subject:

Thank you for your answers.. Btw, is Reiser4 more performant than ReiserFS?
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chrbecke · Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2005 7:36 am Post subject:

http://www.namesys.com/ section "Benchmarks".

Sangeki · Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2005 10:01 am Post subject:

It's maybe more perfomant then ReiserFS but only until you lose all your data and you have to reinstall.

I didn't try Reiser4 lately (will do.... some day) but it has eaten my data twice.
I hope it's more stable now and will continue to be even more in the future.

yngwin · Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2005 8:41 pm Post subject:

Since it reached version 1.0.0, Reiser4 has never failed on me. And I use it for practically my whole (x86) system. So experiences seem to vary. Note that Reiser4 is not officially supported by Gentoo, and the Gentoo devs rather discourage you to use it. But it does offer a noticeable speed-up.
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GaMMa · l33t Joined: 23 Aug 2002 Posts: 684 Location: USA

Yea there is a speedup for this, and I think it's a lot better of a choice for laptops because for me personally it doesn't write to the disc every second like ext2/3 appeared to do. It's fast and stable for me and haven't had any compatiblity issues using it compared to other filesystems. I've never lost any data that was WRITTEN to the drive because of it; where ext3 files in use sometimes corrupt when manually shutting the system down. I've been using reiser4 for about a year and a half by the way.
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Moartel · Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2005 4:50 am Post subject:

reiser4 for laptops:
reiser4 uses CPU very extensively and needs more battery-power than any other filesystem. So if you need a long runtime of your notebook with battery reiser4 isn't a really good alternative. Somebody recommended JFS for this purpose, but I can't think of one positive comment on JFS in this forum (pretty unstable), so I wouldn't try this.
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aminalshmu · Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2005 8:28 pm Post subject:

i've been using reiser4 exclusively for about a year now, and now i'm in the process of getting rid of it. i did have a nasty corruption and complete data loss after using it for a few months, but i think most of those problems have been worked out, and it's worked flawlessly enough for me for ~8 months. however, in my mind the performance gains are minimal, if any, over using a much more tried and true filesystem which uses much less CPU. also, i think it has become pretty fragmented with use, because of the way it packs data so tightly - and there is no repacker available yet to fix performance issues with aging filesystems. maybe in a year or two (or more...) after reiser4 is included in the mainstream kernel and is known to be rock-solid, and the plugin architecture begins to be used for some interesting projects... maybe it will be more worthwhile. but right now as the kernel developers (and gentoo devs at that) are not officially supporting it... it's really not worth the time.

it's time for me to switch to good old ext3... you really can't go wrong.

MetalWarrior · Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 5:48 am Post subject:

flatelin · n00b Joined: 27 Aug 2004 Posts: 41

I have migrated /usr/portage from ext3 to reiserfs for one very simple reason: disk space.
ext3 allocates a minimum of 4k to each file, even if it's much smaller than that. reiserfs also uses 4k
blocks, but will pack many smaller files (and tails of larger files) into the same 4k block.

The portage tree contains lots and lots of small files. By switching /usr/portage from ext3 to
reiserfs, the portage tree shrunk by over 100M for me.

On some machines, I use reiserfs for all partitions (except /boot, where I use ext2) and have
never had problems. I have not tried reiser4 anywhere and probably won't until it's included
in vanilla-sources (mostly because I'm lazy and don't have any real need to change from
reiserfs).

volospin · Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2005 10:04 pm Post subject:

ever since my first Gentoo installation...
I only use ext3 for /boot partition

I use reiserfs for all of the rest.

recently I encounter a limit of ext3 that reiserfs doesn't have.

ext3 has limit of 32000 files or directories which reiserfs doesn't have.

Still glad to have chosen reiserfs since it didn't fail me.
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UncleOwen · Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 2:27 am Post subject:

ocbMaurice · n00b Joined: 14 Feb 2003 Posts: 36 Location: Switzerland

Suicidal · l33t Joined: 29 Jul 2003 Posts: 852 Location: /dev/null

MetalWarrior · Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 3:46 am Post subject:

I think I will use Reiserfs.. Now the only thing I need is my new laptop, hoping I will get it one day or another (Hitachi continuously delayes the release of its new 7k100 SATA hard disks.. :cry:

)...
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