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Jake
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 Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 7:31 pm Post subject: |
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reiser4 is mostly stable on x86. If it was completely stable, it would be in vanilla. You'll notice a speed boost for certain tasks, and you'll notice improved space efficiency for small files (/usr/portage, for example). Don't use reiser4 if you don't have CPU cycles to spare. This shouldn't be an issue if your hardware is relatively modern, but don't use reiser4 on a P133.
Theoretically, the only way you'll lose data is if you reboot before fsyncing. It's possible to have files go missing if you created them just before a hard reset. the advantage, however, is that your fs should never get corrupted from hard resets because your transactions either completely succeed or completely fail. |
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MrApples
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| Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 8:23 pm Post subject: |
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yes that all made me very confident wheni started using it, but errors still came
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Xithix
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| Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 8:31 pm Post subject: |
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| Jake wrote: | | Theoretically, the only way you'll lose data is if you reboot before fsyncing. It's possible to have files go missing if you created them just before a hard reset. the advantage, however, is that your fs should never get corrupted from hard resets because your transactions either completely succeed or completely fail. |
Theoretically. My reiser4 box (which recently failed for an unrelated reason) had file corruptions after most hard resets. Some of them were severe enough to have to run fsck.reiser4 with --build-fs because --fix was too weak.
If you don't screw up things like the Xorg config with errors that cause it to hard freeze (I was guilty of this), you won't need to hard reset, but the time spend fscking a drive is greater than the speed increase imo.
I would recommend reiser 3.6 until it goes into vanilla. |
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MrApples
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| Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2005 4:46 am Post subject: |
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i really agree with this, also, as a somewhat related note, i once lost all data when running --build-fs after some corruption
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Jake
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| Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2005 6:08 am Post subject: |
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| Xithix wrote: | Theoretically. My reiser4 box (which recently failed for an unrelated reason) had file corruptions after most hard resets. Some of them were severe enough to have to run fsck.reiser4 with --build-fs because --fix was too weak.
If you don't screw up things like the Xorg config with errors that cause it to hard freeze (I was guilty of this), you won't need to hard reset, but the time spend fscking a drive is greater than the speed increase imo.
I would recommend reiser 3.6 until it goes into vanilla. |
As I understand reiser4, you should never have to run fsck.reiser4 --fix, much less --build-fs. It might suffer from the same problem as BSD UFS with softupdates, that writes get cached on ATA drives, defeating atomic transfers, but you'd have to ask on the mailing list for a definitive answer. If the problem isn't caching, you should have reported a bug. As I recall, I've made it through every hard reset on x86 without needing to --fix or --build-fs. Of course I've been using reiser4 for almost a year, so I might be forgetting something from the days when there were still known bugs. |
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MrApples
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| Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2005 7:27 am Post subject: |
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i dont think that our problem is unique tho, ive heard it from many people
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Archangel1
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| Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2005 8:06 am Post subject: |
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| Jake wrote: | | As I understand reiser4, you should never have to run fsck.reiser4 --fix, much less --build-fs. ...<snip>... As I recall, I've made it through every hard reset on x86 without needing to --fix or --build-fs. Of course I've been using reiser4 for almost a year, so I might be forgetting something from the days when there were still known bugs. |
Yeah atomic file transfers blah blah... I've had to fsck a couple of times in the past, generally when I got pissed off beacuse something else had broken and powered off during heavy hdd activity. Not my finest moment...
Anyway, I would have expected reiser4 to cope with this, but it didn't. Both times --build-fs was required.
I think that was about nine/ten months ago now - I forget exactly, but it's been rock solid for me with the more recent snapshots. The only issue I find is if it loses power unexpectedly, a few recent transactions can be lost - like the last minute's worth. Looks like there might be some serious write caching occurring?
But I don't think that can count against calling it stable; that is an unexpected poweroff so I guess it's taking no chances with corrupted data. The rest of the time it's been fine.
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Jake
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| Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2005 10:16 am Post subject: |
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| Archangel1 wrote: | I think that was about nine/ten months ago now - I forget exactly, but it's been rock solid for me with the more recent snapshots. The only issue I find is if it loses power unexpectedly, a few recent transactions can be lost - like the last minute's worth. Looks like there might be some serious write caching occurring?
But I don't think that can count against calling it stable; that is an unexpected poweroff so I guess it's taking no chances with corrupted data. The rest of the time it's been fine. |
That's the fsync issue. There was something on the mailing list about it recently. An atom commits when it gets too large, too old, or when fsync is called. |
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Archangel1
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| Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2005 10:29 am Post subject: |
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| Jake wrote: | | That's the fsync issue. There was something on the mailing list about it recently. An atom commits when it gets too large, too old, or when fsync is called. |
Ah right. Thanks for clearing that up.
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IWBCMAN
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| Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2005 11:32 am Post subject: |
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I have been running reiserfs4 on 2 machines since it came out. Have yet to have any problems whatsoever.
If you are worried make tarball backups of non-replacable stuff.... |
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Lepaca Kliffoth
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| Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2005 4:02 pm Post subject: |
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Reiser4 has always worked fine for me. Once something ugly happened and the system crashed very hard, however after a reboot my files were still there. The changes I had done in the last few seconds were somehow canceled, a couple of files were back in the directory from where I had moved them and a small text file I had copied from a disk had disappeared. I never experienced any kind of data corruption.
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Varuna
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Joined: 10 Jun 2004
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Location: Connecticut, United States
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| Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2005 5:13 pm Post subject: |
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I've been trying it for several months now, and about one month ago, I moved absolutely everything except /boot onto Reiser4 partitions. Over these months, the file system became corrupted twice, though I can't necessarily correlate the corruption with hard resets. In both cases, repeated applications of --build-fs and --fix restored the corrupted partition with no data loss. In one of those cases, I was unable to chroot into the affected partition even after file system consistency was restored, but I was still able to copy my files to another partition.
I have two similar but independent Gentoo installations on my hard drive, both on Reiser4, so I can get work done by using the backup installation while reformating a corrupted partition, then copying my files back to the reformated partition, if necessary. It works very well.
Conclusions: I wouldn't use Reiser4 if you need to emphasize stability, but if spending twenty minutes every couple of months fixing something is acceptable, it is very workable, and in return, it is incredibly fast and efficient  . And, of course, its stability should only get better! |
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m0sia
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Joined: 07 Jul 2003
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| Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2005 7:05 pm Post subject: |
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| I bought new computer in august, then i created reiser4 root partition and copied root from old harddisk. Then i started reemerging world with new CFLAGS for new P4 processors. The system hangs and i lost all newly emerged data and fresh distfiles. =((( after that i reformatted partition in reiserfs. Now i thinking about reiser4, maybe now it is more stable? |
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DCatcher
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| Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 11:39 am Post subject: |
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| Hauser wrote: | | I use a reiser4 partition for all the portage stuff (/usr/portage, /var/tmp/ccache, /var/tmp/portage), it works very well; I've used reiser4 for root partition before, but didn't notice much performance improvement over reiserfs except when doing emerge sync or dealing with a large number of files (such as untarring a backup tarball onto a reiser4 partition). |
I'm using Reiser4 for /usr/portage, too. So I need just 120MB for all the current ebuilds. (You'll need much more with other fs.) I also think about putting /var/tmp on an Reiser4 partition, too, but I have no clue how much disc place I'll need. So if anyone can tell me some numbers, I'll be happy
Last edited by DCatcher on Mon Feb 14, 2005 1:43 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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fallow
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Location: Poland
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| Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 1:16 pm Post subject: |
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I`m using reiser4 since 0.5.x , and all the time on whole '/' since 1.0
for me is stable now. I have no problems with hard resets and etc. I had serious problem once and fsck.reiser4 --build-fs fixed it. I have backup , but I have it always ( in the past with reiser3,xfs,jfs also ) . Backup is the prior thing 
For me minus of reiser4 is it implementation.depending oh idea it`s high performance and very high cpu usage filesystem and in effect of this = some problems during heavy I/O load. problems likes lags,slow downs - less interactivity.
It`s best visible with 2.6.11-rcX and Staircase. So for whole '/' reiser4 usage and prevent of lags/slow downs is good to have O(1) or Nick`s Scheduler as CPU Sched.
cheers.
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Moloch
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Location: Albuquerque, NM, US
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| Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 5:45 pm Post subject: |
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I've been using reiser4 for about 4 months now. I'm running it on top of lvm2. I use reier4 on /tmp /var /usr /home. I use xfs on storage and a few other mounts where I mostly store large files. I've had hardlocks numerous times playing with nvidia and xorg. Haven't had any data corruption yet. Downside with reiser4 is no resizing. So with lvm2 I cannot reisize. Which is why I use xfs on storage partitions that I would want to resize. xfs can resize a partition while it's mounted 
I use ext3 on /boot and /
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Debentoo_Gao
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Joined: 21 Nov 2003
Posts: 85
Location: Shanghai,China
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| Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2005 6:16 am Post subject: |
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I got a problem with reiser4 as my root file system. I found some win software running with wine can't use in reiser4,but they work perfectly in my xfs based system.I don't know why:oops:
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MasterX
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| Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2005 6:38 am Post subject: |
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If you start with reiser3.6 can you then update the filesystems to reiser4?
Is it wise to assume that reiser3.6 is as safe as ext3 is? |
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Jake
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| Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2005 7:33 am Post subject: |
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| MasterX wrote: | If you start with reiser3.6 can you then update the filesystems to reiser4?
Is it wise to assume that reiser3.6 is as safe as ext3 is? |
reiser4 is a completely different filesystem and you can't upgrade from reiserfs. ext3 seems to deal with bad hardware better than reiserfs, but otherwise it isn't significantly safer. |
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syouth
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| Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2005 11:03 am Post subject: |
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| Jake wrote: | | MasterX wrote: | If you start with reiser3.6 can you then update the filesystems to reiser4?
Is it wise to assume that reiser3.6 is as safe as ext3 is? |
reiser4 is a completely different filesystem and you can't upgrade from reiserfs. ext3 seems to deal with bad hardware better than reiserfs, but otherwise it isn't significantly safer. |
Roger! I had problems with my new harddrive. It was in use for 3 weeks and had reiserfs (v3) and my music data on it. Then strange things occured: I was playing mp3 files and then some clibbering noise and silence. I umounted and did fsck. There were too many errors to count. I didn't know, it was hardware problem then and thought that reiserfs had gone crazy. After some more checks and thougts "let's hope this solved it! -- but no!", I made additional ext3 partitions on that drive and copied my media there. Everything was ok for a week more, but still there was this queer feeling, that everything's not right. Then strange things came to happen again and I went deeper to investigate. dmesg showed some ugly things and all was clear. I went to shop and they gave me new harddrive, that is working right now (phew!) without problems. I was near to complete loss of my music files - I lost some, but rescued nearly all that were important. If I had taken this reiserfs misfunction more seriously, the data loss would have been zero.
My point is: Yes! Reiserfs is more sensitive, which is good thing.
Now I run my reiser4 and older reiserfs / from that drive and everything seems to be smooth. /home is reiser4 too. But media data is still on reiserfs and ext3, 'till reiser4 comes to offially supported.
So if you have some room on your hdd to spare, give a try to reiser4. :)
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acasto
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| Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2005 11:55 am Post subject: |
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I just had some problems with my reiser4 partition as well. However it was directly after a kernel re-compile where I had just thrown in and torn out some rough patches. And I also compile it with -O3 cflags. So I ran a make mrproper and recompiled at -O2. fsck.reiser4 worked find, but I went ahead and restored from a backup because I was wanting to shift around some partition anyways to free up some space to play with a BSD.
- Adam
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MasterX
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| Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2005 3:51 pm Post subject: |
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| syouth wrote: |
So if you have some room on your hdd to spare, give a try to reiser4. |
I have room to spare, but I do not want to lose my data. So, I will go for the reiser3.6, since it is more efficient than ext3. |
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syouth
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| Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 6:36 am Post subject: |
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| MasterX wrote: | | syouth wrote: |
So if you have some room on your hdd to spare, give a try to reiser4. :) |
I have room to spare, but I do not want to lose my data. So, I will go for the reiser3.6, since it is more efficient than ext3. |
What you mean by "losing data"? If you mean your media/documents and other unique stuff, then they are staying in stable partitions (ext3, reiserfs, etc.). If something happens with /, you will lose only your system. You don't have to delete your current /. It can stay as a stable working system and you can return to that any time you want.
Or what you mean?
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MasterX
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| Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 7:39 am Post subject: |
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| syouth wrote: | | MasterX wrote: | | syouth wrote: |
So if you have some room on your hdd to spare, give a try to reiser4. |
I have room to spare, but I do not want to lose my data. So, I will go for the reiser3.6, since it is more efficient than ext3. |
What you mean by "losing data"? If you mean your media/documents and other unique stuff, then they are staying in stable partitions (ext3, reiserfs, etc.). If something happens with /, you will lose only your system. You don't have to delete your current /. It can stay as a stable working system and you can return to that any time you want.
Or what you mean? |
I will do a fresh install of Gentoo on my notebook, and I am thinking of using a different, more efficient, filesystem than ext3.
You are suggesting to have reiser3.6 for the home directory and reiser4 for all the other directories (/, /var,/usr). This is a possible configuration. Or maybe I can have the home directory and / reiser3.6 and all the others reiser4. So that I can always boot into Linux and emerge whatever was broken. |
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rush_ad
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Location: New Jersey, USA
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| Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 2:33 pm Post subject: |
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| i was thinking about using reiser4 on my media and docs data. is R4 good enough to store my movies and songs without any data loss possibilities? |
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