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What Reiser4 needs for you to start using it?
Mainline inclusion
40%
 40%  [ 10 ]
Encryption
0%
 0%  [ 0 ]
Snapshots
0%
 0%  [ 0 ]
Defrag
0%
 0%  [ 0 ]
Performance
0%
 0%  [ 0 ]
Subvolumes
0%
 0%  [ 0 ]
Grub2 support
4%
 4%  [ 1 ]
Something else
32%
 32%  [ 8 ]
It's already perfect
4%
 4%  [ 1 ]
I'd never use it
20%
 20%  [ 5 ]
Total Votes : 25

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dusanc
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 24, 2014 12:17 pm    Post subject: Reiser4 - what's missing to suit your needs? Reply with quote

So I was thinking of doing some work on some new R4 fearure but it already has everything I need so I'd like to see what would suit gentooers the most. Please discuss your options, don't just vote on the poll.
Thanks
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 24, 2014 1:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I was using reiser3 in the past but stopped using it after dragging on for a while.

Having it in the kernel repository is mandatory. I hate having to hunt for patches when I need to upgrade the kernel for security reasons.

The main worry I had with reiser3 was that when I had disk corruption, though it wasn't the fault of reiserfs itself, it really blew up, needing a backup/restore and couldn't be recovered. I had much more success extracting data from a damaged ext2/ext3 partition when bit corruption set in.

The kernel driver size used to be an issue as ext2 was smaller than reiserfs, but ext3 and ext4 have gotten to be just as big.

My recent move to SSDs and ext4 was just to take advantage of TRIM. I'm not sure if this has been implemented yet or not in reiserfs. At this point I'm not exactly changing disk formats however...
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mv
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 24, 2014 2:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I guess if it would be in kernel, it would be the fs of my choice: A journal without redundant writes, that's what I want. The decision ext*<->Reiser4 would be simple.
There are not so many alternatives: From what I hear, BTRFS has still lots of issues with almost full volumes and will perhaps never play nice with them. Since all of my partitions are usually close to full, this is a no-go for me. ZFS might be an alternative, but with lacking native support through the kernel, this is also excluded.
From what I hear XFS and JFS are only for huge data and can have huge problems with crashes.

However, as eccerr0r said: mainline kernel is mandatory. Thus, all discussions are just utopic...
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 24, 2014 2:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I don't see an option for a Honda CRX.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 24, 2014 3:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

mv wrote:
I guess if it would be in kernel, it would be the fs of my choice: A journal without redundant writes, that's what I want. The decision ext*<->Reiser4 would be simple.
There are not so many alternatives: From what I hear, BTRFS has still lots of issues with almost full volumes and will perhaps never play nice with them. Since all of my partitions are usually close to full, this is a no-go for me. ZFS might be an alternative, but with lacking native support through the kernel, this is also excluded.
From what I hear XFS and JFS are only for huge data and can have huge problems with crashes.

However, as eccerr0r said: mainline kernel is mandatory. Thus, all discussions are just utopic...


If you fill up a z-pool under ZFS you are screwed.

As for JFS, I use JFS on most of my partitions and I have found the recovery tools to be great in the event of a crash; nice and fast and no issues.
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 6:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'd love to see reiser come back, and I'm not too fussed about it being in-kernel, though obviously that would be a valuable strategic goal.

I'd only take the chance if there were quite a few people already committed to it in Gentoo (so I'll keep an eye on this thread.)

More likely to chance that than BTRFS, for a few years yet.

Mostly I'd want to hear testimonials that it's working reliably, from Gentoo users who are likely to push it.
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 10:37 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I liked reiser3 (still use it on my non-ssd partitions) never had any problems from it (but still backup nightly).
I switched to btrfs on my root/home partition which are on my ssd (because of trim)
I just wasn't sure of the stability of reiser4. If it's stable enough and supports trim then I could see switching back.
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 11:06 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Anon-E-moose wrote:
I liked reiser3 (still use it on my non-ssd partitions) never had any problems from it (but still backup nightly).
I switched to btrfs on my root/home partition which are on my ssd (because of trim)
I just wasn't sure of the stability of reiser4. If it's stable enough and supports trim then I could see switching back.


I didn't offer cow or trim as poll options as R4 already supports them. You can have trim, journal, hybrid or cow partition by simple option in fstab as you can see in my R4 FAQ in Q18.

As for stability:
1. Take a usb drive, format it as R4, statr copying large or small files on it and then yank it out while copying. Plug it in and make conclusions.
2. Same as above just fill it up with large or small files then make conclusions.
3. Use it for /usr/portage then make conclusions.


Fanboys will always post stories about how some fs is good. I don't believe them without testing myself.
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 12:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for the reply, I may just test it out.
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 3:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dusanc wrote:
Fanboys will always post stories about how some fs is good. I don't believe them without testing myself.

Sure; but pre-filtering isn't the same as believing it without testing; it's a stage before that, and depends on who you're listening to.

For instance if mv, Anon or ecc reported problems, and more importantly reported a bad attitude in relation to sorting out the problem, I'd steer clear of it, irrespective of a fanboy trying to make it sound elitist to do what he wants.
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 3:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

steveL wrote:
dusanc wrote:
Fanboys will always post stories about how some fs is good. I don't believe them without testing myself.

Sure; but pre-filtering isn't the same as believing it without testing; it's a stage before that, and depends on who you're listening to.

For instance if mv, Anon or ecc reported problems, and more importantly reported a bad attitude in relation to sorting out the problem, I'd steer clear of it, irrespective of a fanboy trying to make it sound elitist to do what he wants.


You have a point, but maybe m-l archives would be better source of information. There you can see problems users report and how devs respond without fanboys :)[/url]

http://marc.info/?l=reiserfs-devel&r=1&w=2


PS. There's a forum too http://sourceforge.net/p/reiser4/discussion/general/
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 3:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Heh thanks for getting the point ;) (and touché;)

This seems relevant to the kernel discussion. Perhaps we could work out a way of applying the patch in a gentoo-sources ebuild, though something tells me someone has already done that..
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 3:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

all points from my POV:

* Mainline inclusion - yeah, would be nice

* Encryption - what for ? there's already luks

* Snapshots - that's already possible with LVM, right ?

* Defrag - would be nice, yeah, given the experience I had with reiser4 & I'd say it's nice to have but not mandatory or highest priority

* Performance - with all the different options & tweaking possible and technology behind it should be ok, so also not so high on the list

* Subvolumes - would be nice, but with gpt partitions and lvm, also not so important

* Grub2 support - a /boot partition is always nice to have and saves your ass on several occasions - so it shouldn't be an issue, right ? ;)

* Something else - yes please: checksums - it's probably a bigger task to undertake but besides that reiser4 in my opinion and experience is close to perfection
there aren't any files or folder that can't be deleted anymore, right ?

* It's already perfect - close to it, yes

* I'd never use it - I'd definitely would use it again, but given that I had several harddrives failing in recent times and noticed brokenness due to checksum mismatches beforehand - checksums are practically a must
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 3:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hmm looks like only the 3.16 patch would have any chance of being viable, since it was cut this month.

The -o hash=tea_hash option looks handy (and rings a bell); as mentioned the above bug has been around for a few years.

edit: this looks promising as well (for snapshots.)
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 4:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:

* Something else - yes please: checksums - it's probably a bigger task to undertake but besides that reiser4 in my opinion and experience is close to perfection
there aren't any files or folder that can't be deleted anymore, right ?

* It's already perfect - close to it, yes

* I'd never use it - I'd definitely would use it again, but given that I had several harddrives failing in recent times and noticed brokenness due to checksum mismatches beforehand - checksums are practically a must


AFAIK it uses checksums for cc partitions as you can see from this bug report from 2008 http://marc.info/?l=reiserfs-devel&m=120397635400429&w=2 that's why I didn't offer it as option. Dunno for regular partitions as I don't use them. Undeletable dir bug got recently fixed so KoT you'd be perfect tester with your frequent kernel crashes and power loss if you stay away from ricing options ;)
KoT is the author of R4 tuning guide for gentoo.[/quote]
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 4:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dusanc wrote:
KoT you'd be perfect tester

++ KoT is one of the premium testers. If you can get him on-board for QA, you'll be in a much stronger position.
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 4:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

steveL wrote:
dusanc wrote:
KoT you'd be perfect tester

++ KoT is one of the premium testers. If you can get him on-board for QA, you'll be in a much stronger position.

And if he could use some of his failing HDDs for /usr/portage under R4 and report how fsck handled it it would be great.
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 5:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Concerning stability, there is one thing which always worried me with reiser3:

It could completely destroy your partition if you regenerate the tree and had a file on it which was a "dd" of a reiser3 partition.
This complete non-separation between metadata and user-data just is very dangerous when a regen-tree is necessary; especially since it might always happen that some random data (especially compressed or encrypted) might by accident look in some sectors like reiserfs metadata.

And experience shows that I had to regen-tree every few weeks (just like with ext4 I manually have to call fsck every few weeks because of fixes which cannot be done automatically). I have no idea why this is so - perhaps some of my hardware is not reliable enough or there is some too strong electromagnetic field near my machines - I can just accept that it is so.
So in the knowledge of this risk, I considered after a while ext4 as the "safer" solution (although meanwhile I also had some seroius data loss with it).

I have no idea whether reiser4 might suffer from that same problem of non-separation of metadata and user-data....

Concerning kernel-inclusion: I have no doubt that one can find some kernel with current reiser4 patches. The problem is more if you want to run kernels with other patches (hardened, overlayfs in my case) or urgently need to run something for testing or repairing (e.g., recently I needed some special testing multimedia kernel for bug reporting): I just wouldn't want to risk to put my main systems and/or important data on a partition which is not "fully" supported by whatever I might need eventually.
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 6:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'd use R4 if it went into mainline. It was a pain in the ass when I tried it a few years ago, but it never lost my data.

Probably not relevant these days, but it was space-efficient enough to use on my old 64MB USB stick too.

I'd forget about it in a split second if Tux3 went mainline though.
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 9:29 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Nina Reiser was missing, but thats not the case anymore.
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 12:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I suppose i should pickup kernel inclusion, as this would gave the best option that could convince me (add in kernel -> more code review -> more testers -> stability).
Because with all respects, your usb stick stability test just sucks.

I hardly know any fs that cannot recover from that scenario. If you are proud reisert4 can recover from that, then you shouldn't and it prove reisert4 is not ready for me..

User don't loose datas because they remove a stick while copying, users loose datas because the stupid fs was updating some metadatas on the source file (like date/time or something) and power goes down ; and the fs or repair tool cannot manage to fix that without killing the file (or partition for the poorest)

So your "stability proof" appears more like a fanboy speak than a real stability fact.
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 1:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

krinn wrote:
I suppose i should pickup kernel inclusion, as this would gave the best option that could convince me (add in kernel -> more code review -> more testers -> stability).
Because with all respects, your usb stick stability test just sucks.

I hardly know any fs that cannot recover from that scenario. If you are proud reisert4 can recover from that, then you shouldn't and it prove reisert4 is not ready for me..

User don't loose datas because they remove a stick while copying, users loose datas because the stupid fs was updating some metadatas on the source file (like date/time or something) and power goes down ; and the fs or repair tool cannot manage to fix that without killing the file (or partition for the poorest)

So your "stability proof" appears more like a fanboy speak than a real stability fact.

It's not some Reiser4 stability proof, it's just the easiest and cheapest way to see how the FS reacts when power goes down while writing data or when it gets filled up, if you know of some better one please point me to it. USB stick is a couple $ doesn't matter if it dies.
Oh and try and see how some FSes react to filling up (PS. especially with small files) or yanking power out (ofc with delayed allocation use sync before yanking ;) ) you'd be surprised.
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 6:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

At least there's some indication that Reiser4 fixed the metadata vs userdata confusion problem, the Wikipedia Page mentions that it had been addressed (even if it's a rather poor source of data). It very well may be that I had a reiserfs image on my reiserfs partition (I likely was experimenting with loopback filesystems at the time), which is fine until I had hardware caused bit corruption, forcing a reiserfsck, and then the disk explodes. Regardless if it was reiserfs's fault, it did leave a sour taste. Luckily no valuable information lost on that disk.

But reiterate, must be in kernel. Last thing I want to deal with is there's some critical kernel security bug and I need to pick up a new kernel to fix it, but there's no filesystem patch for that kernel. Perhaps someone could backport the security patch to the older kernel but other than for experimental uses, this isn't great for 'production' machines of any sort. Security patches...mandatory. Filesystems... there's many to choose from that work well enough. May not be perfect but good enough. But if the filesystem patch doesn't apply to a security fixed kernel and backporting the security patch fails, SOL.
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 1:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I stopped using ReiserFS 3 about a year ago after I've seen 2 servers ending up practically unrecoverable (other than from backups) after part of the partition became unavailable due to a RAID error. Before fsck, I could still copy a few files with lots of "??????" entries and truncated files everywhere. Even what I could copy was in large parts unusable. Even worse, fsck totally broke the filesystem: Reiser lost all links to (sub-)directories and files, ending up in a FS that produces more errors on each consecutive fsck run (which took an insane amount of time...).

I've accidentally erased the start of a Ext4 rootfs partition earlier this year after entering a bad dd command. / had gone missing but the tool I used was able to recover subtrees (including directories and files). By sorting those numerically indexed entries by size, I was able to find what I needed (worldfile, /etc, /home, /root, /var/lib, ...) and reinstall without having lost any data.

Yes, it was only a rootfs, but every data partition would benefit from the same procedure. Of course, I know that fsck/undelete tools do not replace backups, but when the last backup (given, that it exists) has become too old, a partial recovery can help a lot.

If ReiserFS 4 became more resilient than ReiserFS 3, i.e. it would keep metadata backups etc. on its own or use data structures that can easily be found and validated so a copy of what's left can be reconstructed in short time, I might take a look at it.


My next problem with ReiserFS 3 was performance. For me (on multiple machines) it never scaled past 250 GB. Not sure what changed (I read that bitmap caching got disabled?) but at some point (~2.6.35) mounting ReiserFS 3 became incredibly slow. We had to wait 20 minutes for a server to boot up with 750 GB drives, every single time. No fsck going on, just mounting alone took that much time. When it was finally running, accessing certain files/directories would sometimes take 30-40 seconds, no idea why (I/O load shot through the ceiling at that point). The system became pretty much unusable until we switched to Ext4.

Not quite sure if ReiserFS 4 completely solved that problem or we will get a surprise some time later (using partitions >10TB or something like that). Ext4 has scaled much better, so far.


I also would like to see it in mainline as well because I got a feeling that most things outside mainline are not well maintained and cause issues when upgrading to latest kernels. It surely is no problem for "stale" distributions (you know which ones I mean ;) ) but Gentoo is just too individual to watch for more than a few modules that aren't in mainline. I'm not exactly up-to-date when it comes to Reiser4 but I've watched its decline for long enough - I'm not sure if there is enough interest in continuing development on it since the other filesystems developed and improved much faster. With ext4 well-established and btrfs on the horizon, I'm not sure if it's worth spending more time with Reiser4...
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 30, 2014 11:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

c00l.wave wrote:
I stopped using ReiserFS 3 about a year ago
..
If ReiserFS 4 became more resilient than ReiserFS 3

Jeez I stopped using it well over 5 years ago, at least. It was well-known that there were bugs which weren't going to get
addressed as the main developer was in jail for years to come, and the few remaining people on his staff wanted to
focus on 4.
Quote:
I also would like to see it in mainline as well because I got a feeling that most things outside mainline are not well maintained and cause issues when upgrading to latest kernels. It surely is no problem for "stale" distributions (you know which ones I mean ;) ) but Gentoo is just too individual to watch for more than a few modules that aren't in mainline.

Sure we all would. The point is that Gentoo can carry a patchset trivially, starting in an overlay. It might not be the absolute latest
kernel, but so what? They're coming out every month or so afaict.

If you want to test it, do it in a vm, then on metal. And collaborate with other users by providing bug reports and feedback; that's
what they're looking for.
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