Reiser4 enabled gentoo livecd - release notes

thechris · Veteran Joined: 12 Oct 2003 Posts: 1203

any of you care to comment on reiserfs vs xfs in different cases.

my computer was designed (2 years ago) for gamaing and video editing. it has:
athlonXP 1800+, pre-thourobred
gf3ti200
epox 8k3a+ with kt333 chipset and onboard hpt372
leadtek tv card
NIC
possibly an aureal vortex 2 soundcard if i can find it back.
2x 120GB hdds
1x 80GB hdd
dvd-rom
cd-rw

in anycase, i'd like to know how reiser4 stacks up to xfs in both normal use and for dealing with large files. if i do video editing i will be working with files over 1GB. i plan to use software raid as well, so i'm not sure how much it will matter. there seems to be no benchmarks online relating reiser4 to xfs.

also, is there a large performance benefit over ext2 for use in /boot or /tmp? i understand reiser efficiently handels small files, but it is still journalized.

and is it important to make / reiser4 if i have partitions for /usr /tmp /var /boot and /home?

just want to get everything right!

Redeeman · l33t Joined: 25 Sep 2003 Posts: 958 Location: Portugal

reiserfs or reiser4?

currently i must admit, that i use xfs on my primary workstation, it aint as fast as reiser4, but still its nice. reiser4, is speed into the extreme

thechris · Veteran Joined: 12 Oct 2003 Posts: 1203

ok, that's something like what i was asking. what about r4 vs xfs on files over 1GB though?

also, is reiserfs3 upgradeable to reiser4.

and still, r4 vs ext2 for /tmp and /var

and i'm still debating if i want to make / into r4 just yet. i can see the things about portage and all, but i don't know about / .

Guest · Posted: Wed May 12, 2004 6:36 pm Post subject:

As I do not have an option to boot from the LiveCD I tried booting from an external usb2 hardrive on this laptop so I can reiser4 my root. No luck, that BIOS does not see this drive!

Any one know a method to convert root to reiser4 using a LiveCD without reiser4 support (but I know I can boot it) just to piggy back into a reiser4 root conversion?

Or is there a way to boot normally, chroot out of my normal root, copy out all the contents (actually already done and on the external), format reiser4, copy all data back, then reboot into my normal root? Is this a possibility I should read up on?

GentooBox · Veteran Joined: 22 Jun 2003 Posts: 1168 Location: Denmark

Redeeman · l33t Joined: 25 Sep 2003 Posts: 958 Location: Portugal

i use xfs because xfs is simply the most stable filesystem ever made. the only thing that can break it is if hardware dies.

and, reiserfs (the 3.6 version) is the most instable thing made. it dies so easy.

xfs vs reiser4 on 1gb files.
i'd say there are almost no difference on any filesystems when dealing with so large files. ofcourse there are. in case of extracting 1gb archive.
but a 1gb divx or something will be almost the same.

/var and /tmp.
for /var i can say that reiser4 matters a difference, mostly because portage as default has its compile dir there. and i will strongly recommend using it there.

(i myself, though i use xfs for / and /home, have a miscbinds partition, consisting of reiser4, which i use for /usr/portage, /var/tmp/portage, and /home/mail)
and i tell you, dealing with maildirs, you will love reiser4 more than anything.

overall reiser4 is the best filesystem i see, yet, i never experienced a crash with it. i have heard other ppl though, but as i werent in the situation, i cant judge wheather it was reiser4 fault or not.

i run several boxes on reiser4 only, and it works perfect, that includes my laptop, which tends to loose power quite often.

as overall score i would say, reiser4 is a good filesystem, its fast and surprisingly stable. its atomic, so either your files will be perfectly fit, or they wont be. no matter if you lost power.

myself, i plan to bootstrap on a reiser4 root when i have time, school is taking alot lately, and i need my primary workstation,

Säck · Posted: Thu May 13, 2004 2:56 pm Post subject:

i'm running now my laptop on reiser4 and i'm really happy. I already mentiont it.
But for some reason i'm having a problem getting evolution to start, and i'm actually not sure wheter it's reiser4 relatet. I already opend a topic dealing with that problem, but i don't avance

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=171186&highlight=

Now my question, how probable is it that this is a reiser4 problem, and does anyone of you how uses reiser4 as / has the same problem?? Strangly the ./.evolution dir can't get created so this is the reason why i think it could be reiser4 related. Anyhow, it would be great to hear some opinions from people that are more expirenced with reiser4 and undersand better the problems coming up with a new filesystem.
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Guest · Posted: Thu May 13, 2004 6:17 pm Post subject:

I am all reiser4 save for my root partition as I can't boot the CD on this laptop (doesnt' read the CDROM).

It appears the new knoppix cds are booting firewire drives so I guess I'll have to wait until they support reiser4 to get my root converted.

In my inpatience I tried this, to no avail:

This doesn't seem to work as when I am chrooted into the external harddrive, that external has to mount somewhere, so I mount it to my normal root. Well, obviouly that sounds a bit wrong, so it does not work out.

If there are any linux magicians out there with any ideas I'm game to hear em. I am inpatient as hell to get reiser4 on here now that I got a taste! Oh, and I can try indefinitely as copying back my root with cp -Rpf works without a hitch, even after mulitple nukes.

Guest · Posted: Fri May 14, 2004 1:03 am Post subject:

Don't all crowd around and fight trying to help here: yes, a haha is in order. I resorted to creating a second Linux O.S. on one of the partitions, and using that to piggy back the operations to convert my main root.

I must say Reiser4 is above my expectations. Thanks again for the patch Redeeman.

wrc1944 · Posted: Fri May 14, 2004 8:35 pm Post subject:

I just finished a new Gentoo install on a new 40G drive, and I'm using reiser3, and have created 2 empty reiser3 partitions, /data, and data2, along with the usual /boot, /, and swap. I tried the reiser4 live-cd but never could get it it work, as I'm on dialup. (See my above post).

Anyway, I know this sounds simplistic, but why couldn't I just boot the live reiser4 cd, and make one of the data partitions reiser4, and then copy over my current /, and then edit fstab to make the reiser4 partition the new / in reiser4?

There's probably a good reason this can't be done, like losing permissions and symlinks, so could a more knowledgable linux expert give me a good explanation as to why this won't work, and if there is a way to add more steps so that it would work?

Thanks,
wrc1944
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

Guest · Posted: Fri May 14, 2004 8:52 pm Post subject:

If you can boot the Reiser4 LiveCD you can probably do this:

Before you start, just make sure you are able to use chroot from the reiser4 LiveCD in case you need to do some diagnotic work later. Also, note I skipped some steps above, like mount etc...

This is what I had to do, so I know it works. cp -Rpf preserves links and the integrity of all of your files permissions etc... Even more, in my case, I could not even boot the LiveCD so I had to make a small temporary Linux install on one of the partitions, and piggy back from there, then copy all the stuff from root back to root etc... It worked great. Your situation seems less complicated. Good luck!

phlashback · Posted: Sat May 15, 2004 12:21 am Post subject:

I could boot the liveCd, but could not see my hd's... but redeeman is 'da man and posted his spec files for making the live cd. I now have a LiveCd tuned for my system, and reiser4 as /

I am loving every second of it. I thought my system was quick before.. thanks again for doing the hard work, all I had to do was kill a few cpu cycles and work out some minor kinks.

Give a person a LiveCD and they can use it to its potential. Teach a person to build there own LiveCd and they are limited only by the size of the media :twisted:

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thechris · Veteran Joined: 12 Oct 2003 Posts: 1203

any info on making reiser4 partitions on raid. i cna't find mkraid or mkdraid as listed in the guides.

i'm going to try booting from the reiser4 cd, then running mkraid from another live cd.

Redeeman · l33t Joined: 25 Sep 2003 Posts: 958 Location: Portugal

when copying stuff, use cp -a.

alari · Posted: Sun May 16, 2004 1:35 pm Post subject:

None of the links seem to work for me.I do a

Redeeman · l33t Joined: 25 Sep 2003 Posts: 958 Location: Portugal

you need to download the .torrent
and then you do btdownloadcurs.py something.torrent

or use the http mirror

Säck · Posted: Mon May 17, 2004 1:51 pm Post subject:

I just wanted to post that the problems I had concerning Evolution came from reiser4
i switched back to resier3.6 because w2k didn't work in vmware. after having done a new installation on reiser3.6, evolution finally worked.
well reiser4 is still beta.
sad since i really liked the performance gain i got. guess i gotta wait until its stable and all apps get along with reiser4.
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wrc1944 · Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 3:30 am Post subject:

As a test, I copied / over to /data2, another reiser3 partition on hda6 (omitting dev, proc, and sys), and that worked fine. After I created new dev, proc, and sys directories, I could change fstab and grub.conf, and boot to the hda6 as root with Redeeman6. Everything worked just like my normal hda3 root, and I was able to boot to either root, by selecting the kernel at boot that pointed to it in grub.conf. I then wiped / on hda6, and went back to the beginning.

I booted to the Redeeman6 kernel, installed reiser4progs, and did:

mkfs.reiser4 /dev/hda6

which apparently worked fine. It was already mounted, so I tried to copy over / again to hda6 (now reiser4), but it wouldn't work. I got a "wrong fs type,or bad superblock" error.

Since my test worked with reiser3, I thought it would with reiser4. However, not being able to copy my root to the hda6 reiser4 partition makes me think I can't do it the other way either discussed here on this thread, i.e., copy / to the data2 partition when it's reiser3 (which worked fine), and then make the hda3 old / reiser4, and copy / back to hda3. I'm stymied until I find out why copying / from reiser3 to reiser4 isn't working. If I can't copy my hda3 reiser3 / to hda6 reiser4, why could I copy a copied reiser3 / on hda6 back to a new hda3 reiser4? Isn't it the same procedure I tried, and failed at? Also, I couldn't create any files or folders on hda6 when it was reiser4.

Any advice? Could someone who has done it please list all the steps, with all the exact detail, not leaving out anything- assume I know nothing. I thought I had this figured out, but apparently I'm missing something important. I'm pretty sure my Redeeman6 kernel is OK, as it boots and operates perfectly, dialup, and all. It did create a reiser4 partition.

Thanks,
wrc1944
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

wdreinhart · Guru Joined: 11 Jun 2003 Posts: 569 Location: 4QFJ12345678

Guest · Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 3:46 am Post subject:

Säck · Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 7:13 am Post subject:

wrc1944 · Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 11:21 am Post subject:

wdreinhart,

That makes perfect sense, and I did try to unmount it first, but it said it was busy. I couldn't figure out why it was busy, but it also said to use the -f option, so I did, and mkfs.reiser4 -f /dev/hda6 said "done," with no error messages, so I assumed all was OK. However, it didn't run through the usual few dialog lines, and the yes/no option like mkreiserfs for reiser3 does.

I'll try again, by editing in "noauto" on the dev/hda6 lin in fstab to be sure it's unmounted when I do mkfs.reiser4 /dev/hda6. Then I'll try copying / to hda6 and see what happens.

My objective is to try / with reiser4 on hda6, while keeping intact my normal hda3 / with reiser3. I didn't want to risk borking my Gentoo install (via dialup!) on hda3 by changing hda3 to reiser4, and then copying back / from hda6, as described on this thread. Since my test (see above) doing this with reiser3 on hda6 worked perfectly, I see no reason I can't simply do the same thing with hda6 being reiser4, and not take the big step of changing the original hda3 / to reiser4, until I'm sure reiser4 will work on this box. This seemed like the ideal solution to test this out- guess I'm about to find out if that's correct.

Thanks for the advice,
wrc1944
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

wrc1944 · Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 12:35 pm Post subject:

UPDATE:

mymachine wrc # mkfs.reiser4 /dev/hda6
mkfs.reiser4 0.5.3
Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 by Hans Reiser, licensing governed by reiser4progs/COPYING.

Block size 4096 will be used.
Linux 2.6.5-Redeeman6 is detected.
Uuid 1ae81381-2e30-49fe-a420-803e28c497a0 will be used.
Reiser4 is going to be created on /dev/hda6.
(Yes/No): yes
Creating reiser4 on /dev/hda6...done

mymachine wrc # mount /dev/hda6
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda6,
or too many mounted file systems
mymachine wrc # mount /data2
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda6,
or too many mounted file systems
mymachine wrc # mount /dev/hda6 /data2
mount: you must specify the filesystem type
mymachine wrc #

Read man mount a few times, checked /etc/filesystems (reiser4 is listed), edited fstab and removed "noauto," changed FS type to reiser4, rebooted- got "some local file systems failed to mount" in boot messages.

Then tried this, and many other mount syntaxes, all get the the same error, or print out Usage messages- I must not be using the right "mount" command, or something else is wrong.
--------------------------------------------------
mymachine wrc # mount -t reiser4 /dev/hda6 /data2
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda6,
or too many mounted file systems
---------------------------------------

All advice is appreciated. Apparently, this time hda6 was correctly formatted as reiser4- I just can't seem to mount it. It still has the
"wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda6, or too many mounted file systems" error. What is the correct mount command I should be using?

This really has me stumped.

wrc1944
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

Redeeman · l33t Joined: 25 Sep 2003 Posts: 958 Location: Portugal

i use vmware, it runs perfect on reiser4, however, you cant use reiser4 IN a vmware.

evolution runs fine.

i dont know what can cause it, but i use nptl, maybe if you dont, thats the problem, honestly, i dont know