Portage Speed-Up? Patching Reiser4 in vanilla kernel

seppelrockt · Guru Joined: 14 May 2004 Posts: 423

Hello,

I have a laptop with a 5400 rpm hard disc and my partitions are in a LVM. Working with portage / all the emerge stuff is realy slow, e.g. searching something with emerge -s or getting an overview of what might me done with emerge -pv --update world.

Now I know that performance of laptop HDs is not that great and LVM might slow them down, too. I curently use reiserfs v. 3 and want to try reiser4 now for a seperate /usr/portage. This is a good testing situation I think, cause reiser4 should be very fast with (many) small files and data loss in the /usr/portage dir could be easily repaired.

My problem is, that I didn't succed in patching the 2.6.12.5 vanilla kernel with the latest patch from namesys' ftp (relase 3 of the patch for 2.6.12.3). I tried it on the plain 2.6.12 sources as well (without the sucker-tree patches) with now success. The patch applies cleanly but I can't find a reiser4 option in menu config. I followed exactly the docs on namesys but there was no 4k / 8k stack option in kernel hacking as well. Did anybody get ot to work with latest vanilla sources?

Archangel1 · Veteran Joined: 21 Apr 2004 Posts: 1212 Location: Work

The problem seems to occur because it depends on ZLIB_INFLATE, which you can't seem to choose anywhere.

Try changing the appropriate part of fs/reiser4/Kconfig to:

SlackwareInAZ · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 29 Aug 2005 Posts: 92

Greetings everyone. First post in Gentoo. As my nickname implies been using Slackware for about two years. Am dabbling in Arch, while waiting for 2005.1 Jackass for Pentium 4 to be available before I give Gentoo a serious try.

Been using Reiser4 patched into the 2.6 vanilla kernel since 2.6.10.

Since 2.6.12 you must under (and pardon me I don't know the nifty screenshot of the menuconfig trick yet!) cryptographic options select crytographic api, then select the deflate compression algorithm option down below and compile it into the kernel (don't select module option). This builds the zlib_deflate library for reiser4 and magically makes the R4 option appear under the filesystem area, where again you must compile it into the kernel, as opposed to a module.

Both my Slackware 10.1 current and Arch 0.7 are on Reiser 4 with the 2.6.12.5 patched with the 2.6.12.3 patch you mentioned from Namesys. I use the libaal 1.0.4.1 and reiser4progs 1.0.4.1 (for Slack and 1.0.4.2 for Arch).

Gary

P.S. I just downloaded 2.6.13 kernel. It seems to accept the namesys 2.6.12.3 patch, but gives a Reiser 4 error during compiling, so I'll keep my eyes peeled to the namesys site. I prefer their patches over the mm series which is still RC.

seppelrockt · Guru Joined: 14 May 2004 Posts: 423

Thanks for the help you two. The problem was that the reiser4 option only appears when CRYPTO and CRYPTO_DEFLATE are set. This is completely stupid behaviour in my opinion caused by the namesys patch. Now I changed the patch to not depend on ZLIB_INFLATE anymore (this is provided by CRYPTO_DEFLATE) but select CRYPTO_DEFLATE automaticaly if REISER4 is ckecked. OK, works here in a dry run test, will check it now in real live an if it works post the patch here. Stay tuned!

seppelrockt · Guru Joined: 14 May 2004 Posts: 423

OK, my modified patch works fine. Patch your kernel-2.6.12.x (tested with 2.6.12.5) as you would with the patch from namesys ftp. Then you can find the reiser4 entry in filesystems without further tweaking - the patch takes care about enabeling the crypto stuff for you automatically. You can find my patch here.