ReiserFS vs Reiser4 [QUESTION]

Message

MetalWarrior · Post by **MetalWarrior** » Wed Sep 28, 2005 3:55 pm

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?

expat_iain · Post by **expat_iain** » Wed Sep 28, 2005 6:02 pm

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 · Post by **JoKo** » Wed Sep 28, 2005 7:57 pm

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 · Post by **Moartel** » Thu Sep 29, 2005 10:45 am

JoKo wrote: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...

Reiser4 on home partition is some kind of russian roulette for me. I can reinstall my system, but I can't rewrite my docs as easy if something fails. The only thing where I would use reiser4 is /usr/portage - if something breaks you just format the partition and do emerge --sync.

MetalWarrior · Post by **MetalWarrior** » Thu Sep 29, 2005 12:18 pm

Thank you for your answers.. Btw, is Reiser4 more performant than ReiserFS?

chrbecke · Post by **chrbecke** » Thu Sep 29, 2005 12:36 pm

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

Sangeki · Post by **Sangeki** » Thu Sep 29, 2005 3:01 pm

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 · Post by **yngwin** » Fri Sep 30, 2005 1:41 am

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.

GaMMa · Post by **GaMMa** » Mon Oct 03, 2005 4:05 am

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.

Moartel · Post by **Moartel** » Mon Oct 03, 2005 9:50 am

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.

aminalshmu · Post by **aminalshmu** » Tue Oct 04, 2005 1:28 am

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 · Post by **MetalWarrior** » Tue Oct 04, 2005 10:48 am

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

Why not reiserfs?

flatelin · Post by **flatelin** » Tue Oct 04, 2005 1:00 pm

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 · Post by **volospin** » Fri Oct 07, 2005 3:04 am

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.

UncleOwen · Post by **UncleOwen** » Fri Oct 07, 2005 7:27 am

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

There is no such thing with ext3.

ocbMaurice · Post by **ocbMaurice** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 5:49 am

UncleOwen wrote:
volospin wrote:ext3 has limit of 32000 files or directories which reiserfs doesn't have.
There is no such thing with ext3.

Well, if I'm not wrong at all, ext2/3 does have a restriction on inodes (and therefore of possible files/directories). So he probaply went out of free inodes (see with df -i). You can specify a bytes-per-inode ratio for ext2/3 filesystems (see man page of mkfs.ext2/3). If you have another free partition you may can move all your data there and then re-create the filesystem with a smaller ratio. ReiserFS does not seem to have this limitation.

Suicidal · Post by **Suicidal** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 8:14 am

MetalWarrior wrote:
aminalshmu wrote:it's time for me to switch to good old ext3... you really can't go wrong.
Why not reiserfs?

I have used reiserfs for 3 years with no problems

MetalWarrior · Post by **MetalWarrior** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 8:46 am

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..

)...

dE_logics · Post by **dE_logics** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 5:10 pm

Update -- The developer of ReiserFS and Reiser4 fs is convicted of murder and now in prison.

So we really do not know what will happen to the FS.

kernelOfTruth · Post by **kernelOfTruth** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 6:20 pm

dE_logics wrote:Update -- The developer of ReiserFS and Reiser4 fs is convicted of murder and now in prison.

So we really do not know what will happen to the FS.

so what ?

why are lots of people as small-minded (no offense) as to equal a creater of {insert any item of "liking"} is a murderer == exitus letalis / "let's move it to /dev/null" ?

if the product(s) are good working why not keep on using them and improving them ?

or do you advocate banning all intellectual property and similarities to those product(s) and re-invent the wheel over and over again ?

reiserfs on /home and several backup-partitions

reiser4 with ccreg (gzip-compression) on /usr/portage, /

reiserfs-, reiser4-users are NOT murderers

so feel free to use those filesystems

tel · Post by **tel** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 8:11 pm

Yep, I agree.

Reiser4 system-wide (except /boot) for more than a year with nary a problem.

jel · Post by **jel** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 10:44 pm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt_by_association
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_unce ... _and_doubt

(And this is from an ext4 advocate! I switched back to ext3 well before the murder and then I jumped the ext4 bandwagon while the FS was still in testing. Couldn't stand the Reiser mount times.)

kernelOfTruth · Post by **kernelOfTruth** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 10:52 pm

jel wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt_by_association
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_unce ... _and_doubt

(And this is from an ext4 advocate! I switched back to ext3 well before the murder and then I jumped the ext4 bandwagon while the FS was still in testing. Couldn't stand the Reiser mount times.)

you're right pure FUD (interesting read thanks for the link to Guilt_by_association !)

it's really sad that people are associating stuff (I DO know that I'm doing it too but I try to consciously avoid it where I can)

you could reduce the (very long) mount times of reiser4 to a minimum by mounting it via mount-option: dont_load_bitmap

1clue · Post by **1clue** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 10:56 pm

What about large files (over 2g) and growing the filesystems?

I want to set up an lvm type of system next, where I can grow the filesystem. I used this on an RS6000 about 10 years ago, haven't done anything like it since.

I'm after a bunch of fixed-size physical volumes, and a growable logical volume.

That, and being able to have large files. Having good storage of small files also would be great.

jel · Post by **jel** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 11:14 pm

kernelOfTruth wrote: you could reduce the (very long) mount times of reiser4 to a minimum by mounting it via mount-option: dont_load_bitmap

At the risk of hijacking the thread: cool! I never ventured as far as reiser4. Perhaps I should set up a test partition to play with...

ReiserFS vs Reiser4 [QUESTION]

ReiserFS vs Reiser4 [QUESTION]

why I use reiserfs for /usr/portage