What's the status on Reiser4? And any kernel suggestions?

Master One · l33t Joined: 25 Aug 2003 Posts: 754 Location: Austria

I was just searching the forum, but it gave no clear results.

Some people tell, that they are using Reiser4 for a long time now without any problems, other report problems right from the beginning.

I know, it's not marked to be stable for use under Linux yet, but nevertheless lot's of people are already using it.

I am on the way buying a new IBM ThinkPad T42p to be used with Gentoo Linux only, and I indeed was thinking about installing Reiser4 on it (on all partitions, except /boot). That should give it a real speed boost with the embedded 60 GB 7200 RPM harddrive.

Anyone else uses Reiser4 on a notebook?

And then I would like to see some kernel suggestions. There are so many patchsets out there nowadays, it's hard to follow, which have the reiser4 patch included, and which not. Or is it maybe the best, to just use plain vanilla sources (development-sources) and only apply the single reiser4 patch?
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Wedge_ · Posted: Mon Jan 24, 2005 4:09 pm Post subject:

I've been using it on a small (3G) partition for well over a year now to store my portage tree, and I haven't had any trouble from it in a long time. I still don't quite trust it enough to use it for anything more important though

rmh3093 · Posted: Mon Jan 24, 2005 4:38 pm Post subject:

hey I have been using reiser4 for a few months now, the only problem I had was my own fault, not reiser4.... this probably would have happened one ext3 also..... but I restarted my computer durring boot a bunch of times because the LCD wasnt turning on (i forgot I had an external monitor hooked up and not turned on) so rebooting the computer a bunch of time wrong corrupted the root fs, but other than that no problems for me
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solar · Developer Joined: 06 Aug 2003 Posts: 22

it is in my understanding that Gentoo is not and has no plans to support r4. As a user you are on your own with this file system.

lude

feld · Guru Joined: 29 Aug 2004 Posts: 593 Location: USA

all partition except boot here. been running it for about a month with no problems. never even faced the lockup when compiling Openoffice or Ximian-OpenOffice. I tried 3 times. It's passed my standards, anyway.

-Feld
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< bmg505> I think the first line in reiserfsck is

if (random(65535)< 65500) { hose(partition); for (i=0;i<100000000;i++) print_crap(); }

fallow · Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2005 7:12 pm Post subject:

my subjective point of view :

benefits of using reiser4 are less than cost of use it at the moment.
Of course is easy to patch kernel for reiser4 ( namesys snapshot , mm broken out etc. ) , also is many of ready to use patchsets on this forum provides reiser4 but is not prior thing imho.

reiser4 is not any Space Travel form

or Ferrari or F1 bolid

is quite faster with _SOME_ operations than reiser3.
CPU usage is worst (higher) than in reiser3, parraler operations are faster for example ( a lot of tests is based only on single operations not parraler ) . Reiser4 implementations changes many of things in kernel and it is radically , speed is provides with less interactivity cost for ex.

I testing reiser4 since 0.5.x snpashot . I have whole system on it.
speed increse is small , cpu usage is high ..I think about definitive return to the reiser3 . logically is less " + " than " - " of using r4 at the moment . Maybe when it will be in vanilla will be much good than now.

Gentoo not support point of reiser4 is clearly understand imho.

cheers.
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Master One · l33t Joined: 25 Aug 2003 Posts: 754 Location: Austria

That kind of feedback is very good until now!

fallow · Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2005 7:44 pm Post subject:

now patching kernel reiser4 is easy , is many ways , imho build own kernel

official livecd don`t support reiser4 , gentoo-dev-sources also don`t support reiser4 . mm-sources is not gentoo-sources , is maintaining by Andrew Morton , not gentoo team

cheers.
_________________
"Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived" J-L. Picard

Master One · l33t Joined: 25 Aug 2003 Posts: 754 Location: Austria

After a lot of reading on this subject, I came to the conclusion, not to use Reiser4. I need this installation on my new IBM ThinkPad T42p to be rock solid for daily work, and if I start playing arround with too much ~x86 stuff, I'm just gonna play arround all the time patching and upgrading, I know myself. So I'll go for ext3 on /boot and reiserfs on all the rest. I'll stick to a "x86" system, keeping the "~x86" to a minimum, but I am definitely gonna try that very interesting installation method "Stage 1 on a Stage3 tarball"

Anyway, thank's for the feedback on that topic, guys.
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thubble · Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 10:27 pm Post subject:

Reiser4 gave an ENORMOUS (like 2-3x) speedup on "emerge sync". It definitely uses more CPU, but on my P4/2.8Ghz it's not really noticeable. One unfortunate problem is that apps seem to take forever to launch, even really tiny apps. For instance, typing "su" on the command line and entering my password can take about 5 seconds to bring up a root shell. Typing "emerge -vp packagename" takes about 10 seconds from pushing "Enter" to seeing the "Calculating dependencies..." message. This is on a just-rebooted machine, with nothing running. Processes are in the "D" state (awaiting I/O, I believe) during this time.

I suspect this may be because I'm using the Staircase scheduler, which I've heard has problems with Reiser4. I'd like to try another scheduler but I can't find an appropriate kernel (there's mm-sources, but it doesn't support nvidia). Also I'm using cfq, and I've heard that deadline or anticipatory is often better.

Another strange problem with Reiser4 is that it breaks some apps. For instance, acroread can't load fonts if it's on an R4 partition, and Wine refuses to run at all. I have to keep an extra Reiser3 partition to run these apps from.

ninjabadger · Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 10:35 pm Post subject:

I too noticed the slow su root on a freshly booted system and have reverted to reiser3, i can not notice much difference.

I think ill stick with it untill there are no problems on reiser4

chemical chris · Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 11:50 pm Post subject:

im using Rieserfs4 for everything except boot on this system with NO faults - and infact - a lot more fault tolerence then i had previously experienced with EXT-3 - espically with concerns to ungrashous rebooting.

predatorfreak · Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2005 12:24 am Post subject:

freelight · Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2005 2:32 am Post subject:

I've been having good luck with my two all-reiser4 systems (on nitro-sources). It definitely uses more CPU power, but the harddrive access speedup is significant. I must admit that I haven't run any benchmarks myself, but I like it, and recommend it for desktop use.

Master One · l33t Joined: 25 Aug 2003 Posts: 754 Location: Austria

It gave me no peace, so I was again reading on this topic since yesterday.

As I understand, the reiser4 patch is not enough, there are some addition small patches that are added to the larger patchsets I've seen, and it also must be taken care to use the proper i/o scheduler (or was it cpu scheduler?).

Can anyone give me a recommendation on a "stable" patchset that incorporates reiser4 + vesa-ng + swsusp2, that had the proper default scheduler(s), and preferably for which there is an ebuild available?
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garlicbread · Apprentice Joined: 06 Mar 2004 Posts: 182

I'm planning on using reiser4 on my laptop (P4) when I get around to rebuilding it
but I won't be able to use it for my Desktop system yet (AMD64)

word of warning for anyone using a AMD64 system, there appears to a specific bug at the moment that's not been fixed with reiser 4
I think this is due to namesys not having a AMD64 machine to play around with, but I've heard that this may be changing soon
(from looking at the reiser dev mailing lists)

Jake · Veteran Joined: 31 Jul 2003 Posts: 1132

garlicbread · Apprentice Joined: 06 Mar 2004 Posts: 182

Yep your right, they've recently fixed the reiser4_find_next_zero_bit bug
that's cool

fallow · Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2005 4:19 pm Post subject: