Would you recommend Reiser4?

dusanc · Apprentice Joined: 19 Sep 2005 Posts: 248 Location: Serbia

Dunno. It's the same question as does anyone sees any difference in using different -use flags, cflags, compiling from source, -rc kernels, -git kernels...
Or like is there anything useful in out of tree patches (eg. TuxOnIce, Ati and Nvidia drivers etc.).
Production systems. I think 0.001 (or less) systems are really production systems.
And I think that you should use only 100% failsafe filesystem for your data. If it only existed

I use reiser4 with lzo1 compression for /, which I can easily restore, (not /home!) because harddisk doesn't grind like with ext3, and because it takes ~1/2 less space for same data.
And the placebo effect is that it's faster

But that's my current choice, and everyone can have it's own.

Have fun

Dushan

Gentree · Posted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 9:19 pm Post subject:

yeah, thanks for the post and the link.

looks like they could use someone to treat them to some decent hosting. "our dsn is out and Fred says he will fix in ten days" does not look that serious. Even if it is not essential that it's always up , it's a quesion of image that could be bettered.

Looks like Shishkin's site is a faire bit more stable.

It seems like most of the dev effort now is just on keeping up with the twists and turns of the kernel and vfs. It would be really good if the kernel team now got behind this and integrated it.

R4 has some outstanding qualities and merits full kernel support.

Anyone who had communication problems with Hans can no longer use that as a logic. It's high time this went mainstream.

About 3/4 of my "non-production" system has been R4 for about 4 years. Rock solid despite frequent power outs.

Kudos to those , past and present, who have made this happen.

_________________
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AthlonXP-M on A7N8X. Portage ~x86

batistuta · Veteran Joined: 29 Jul 2005 Posts: 1384 Location: Aachen

Lucipher · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Feb 2007 Posts: 78

I've installed Reiser4 with LZO compression in my portage's partition. No troubles with formating and using it. If the partition get screwed I'll be able to raise up quickly.
What can I say? So far so good! And it's amazing to see ~550MB transparently (de)compressed in ~174MB. But I would not recommend for /etc /usr /var /home or even / partitions. For /tmp and /usr/portage seems to be fine and not dangerous if some bad things happen.

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 4:49 pm Post subject:

Lucipher · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Feb 2007 Posts: 78

batistuta · Veteran Joined: 29 Jul 2005 Posts: 1384 Location: Aachen

Let's face it guys. Reiser4 is dead, or at least Walt-Disney frozen. The man behind is too busy to work on it. The kernel people have ignored it for quite some time and don't feel like babysitting it. The webstie has been down for how long by now? I'm talking about a Website!! Please, how hard could that be to put it back up? If they don't have the time to fix their website, I wouldn't trust these people with a production-server data.

I know... some people in these thread claim that development hasn't stopped. I have looked for references to this fact, but I haven't found any. So please feed me with some links describing what has been fix/added to Reiser4.

The thing is that there are so many other more supported great alternatives to Reiser4, that I really can't think of a reason why I would use Reiser4 except for just forcing me to backup and having fun from the adrenaline pumping through my blood.

gimpel · Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2008 1:40 pm Post subject:

batistuta · Veteran Joined: 29 Jul 2005 Posts: 1384 Location: Aachen

thanks Gimpel for the links. It looks like Reiser4 is not as dead as I've thought and I'm glad people are still working on it, hopefully it will become more stable and incorporate features like resize and ACLs.

One place where I have used reiser4 in the past is for the portage tree. This is perfect candidate because: lots of small files, and nothing bad will happen if it goes ballistic. I have actually seen improvements in my syncing after using reiser4 there.

gimpel · Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2008 5:01 pm Post subject:

dusanc · Apprentice Joined: 19 Sep 2005 Posts: 248 Location: Serbia

Here's the mail where is outlined current status and direction of reiser4 as of Jan 31, 2008 if you're interested in that sort of things

http://marc.info/?l=reiserfs-devel&m=120173123713322&w=2

Lucipher · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Feb 2007 Posts: 78

When installing my laptop I got this message when I emerge genkernel:

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 12:05 am Post subject:

perhaps with elder versions / kernels it doesn't work ?

I haven't tried genkernel with booting from / but I can assure you, that it at least works in some way with reiser4 (see my livecd series)

so maybe it's just outdated ?

anyone tried ?
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Hardcore Gentoo Linux user since 2004

Mr. Tao · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 Jul 2007 Posts: 147

I use Reiser4 for year or perhaps more. I really like it because my HDs are silent now. I use it for almost everything, except for boot and AFS cache. I would recommend it - with one resevation: I had issues with Reiser4+ccache. I used to have ccache in loop file, I ended up with corrupted FS. Then I had ccache dir in main FS, again I ended up with corrupted FS. So I made logical partition just for ccache, which seems to be save solution. btw: compression ratio on ccache files are better than 1:4, it's awesome.

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 11:17 pm Post subject: Re: ccache issue

grayskunk · n00b Joined: 31 Oct 2004 Posts: 24

If someone were to purchase namesys now, would they assume control over reiser4? Since it seems to be completely community driven now, it seems kind of ... a strange situation

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

kernelofTruth,

Until recently I was using reiser4 on my gentoo partition. I am not sure the segfaulting I was getting that I'll detail below is a bug or to be expected. Anyway, it factored into my decision to try ext4dev (I guess I wanted to be more bleeding edge, since Reiser4 was very stable for me).

If I was running Slackware and opened a console and chrooted into Gentoo and did anything major (fs-wise) such as emerge --sync, everything would seem fine from the chroot environment. When I would boot into Gentoo after this operation reiser4 would invariably segfault.

I would have to restart Gentoo and everything was fine. The behavior was so predictable that for experimentation purposes after syncing the portage tree from a chrooted environment, I would umount the partition and run a fsck on the partition, always without errors being detected.

So what's up with this segfaulting which never occurs if I use Gentoo in the conventional manner? Should I file a bug report?

Another minor observation. I use grub-0.97 for booting. I love it's flexibility. Due to factors involving my hardware I prefer to embed grub into the root sector of the partition and dd the 512bytes and have my Vista bootloader run the show. Reiser4 will not allow grub to permanently embed. It seems the dancing trees change the bootsector. It will work for one or two boots, but after an emerge --sync, that's it.

Had to move the /boot to a ext3 partition. Curiously grub doesn't like the 256-byte inodes. Had to leave that partition with 128-byte inodes. Just more file system anomalies.

Thanks for any information or advice.

Gary

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 7:18 pm Post subject:

Gary, you didn't mention how old the livecd you were using is, also is this a 32bit system or 64bit system ?

I suspect some behavior I (and others) encounter(ed) with earlier reiser4 versions / livecd versions which however is (seems) (mostly) harmless in terms of data safety since I / the other seemingly also never lost any data because of that behavior ...
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Hardcore Gentoo Linux user since 2004

gimpel · Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 7:23 pm Post subject:

Sounds like the version of reiser4 on your slackware box was slightly outdated/buggy.
Recent version (2.6.24) is working just fine here. I do have ccache enabled too. No problemos.
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kernelOfTruth · Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 7:48 pm Post subject:

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

Version of reiser4progs on both slackware and gentoo is 1.6. I formatted the Gentoo partition from inside Slackware with the updated progs sometime ago.

Kernels always had the latest matching reiser4 patches.

Are you both telling me that you do not get that behavior or is that I'm the only one that chroots into an environment that has reiser4?

Admittedly no problems when I use Gentoo in the conventional way. Ext3/ext4dev don't do it, so I am inclined to think it's a bug, albeit a small one.

I am just trying to do my small part to eliminate ALL bugs and get reiser4 included in the mainline kernel.

Thanks again,
Gary

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 9:38 pm Post subject:

gimpel · Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 9:52 pm Post subject:

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 9:57 pm Post subject:

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

kernelofTruth,

maybe I've been too confusing describing my fs layout.

Previously (now using ext4dev fs on Gentoo) I had sda5 (Slackware) with ext3 && sda7 (Gentoo) with reiser4 fs.

The reiser4fs was made from within Slackware using latest reiser4progs-1.0.6. Both operating systems were using 2.6.24.0 vanilla kernels patched with 012508 Edward Shiskin r4 patches-identical configuration.

No problems booting into Gentoo or using reiser4.

Problem occurred when I booted in Slackware and then chrooted into Gentoo from a console and did any file extensive operations such as emerge --sync.

After those operations, if I rebooted into Gentoo it would always segfault. A reboot would fix things. It would not trigger an fsck.

Formatting was mkfs.reiser4 /dev/sda7. No compression plugins or extents/tails specified during formatting.

Hopefully this clarifies this small glitch that is highly reproducible (at least by me)

Thanks,
Gary