how stable is reiser4?

Chaos · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 9:43 am Post subject: how stable is reiser4?

I'm thinking about trying out reiser4 (the speed and features have sounded very promising for some time), but I'm a stickler for data integrity. Obviously I'm aware that it's not marked as stable and I'd be testing it at my own risk, but I was wondering what the general response is to how stable it is (there's always a forum bias that something looks worse than it is because people rarely post to talk about how great something is and often post when something breaks).

Are people running it and finding that it runs fast and without problems?

How about just running without problems, but without a noticable speed improvement or, in fact, a speed decrease?

Anyone have major problems with it?

Thanks!

kimchi_sg · Advocate Joined: 26 Nov 2004 Posts: 3038

I once tried fresh installing with reiser4 using lxnay's liveCD, and was shocked to see that the hard disk drive access light barely blinked at all when doing "emerge system".

My guess is that the drive gets accessed 10 times less in reiser4 than with reiserfs.

I have no idea why, maybe it is more memory-intensive and delivers good results for its memory usage. :-D

Tiger683 · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 10:58 am Post subject:

Don't even think about it... It'll mess your data up BIGTIME....

ExZombie · Apprentice Joined: 29 May 2004 Posts: 170

Tiger683 · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 11:33 am Post subject:

Based on experience, since it destroyed my important data in a productive-environment (I know, stupid to use it there) i hate it very much...

Ever seen files disappear from your bin and home directory?
Though i include reiser4 in nitro-rt, because people want to crash their data, maybe in one week, maybe in a year, you never know the date and time...

And i assume you didn't want to flame me.... i hope it VERY MUCH....

EDIT: i hold it for just as unstable as xfs, a certain proprietary OS etc.

YeahSure · n00b Joined: 16 Nov 2004 Posts: 15 Location: New Brunswick

I've been running reiser4 since it came out in a home workstation environment and its been running fine all along. One thing you might want to do is to ensure you have a boot disk with reiser4 support, like RIP or the reiser4 enabled Gentoo disk available through these forums. Otherwise, if you do get messed up, you can't access the partition.

WladyX · Guru Joined: 25 Nov 2004 Posts: 503 Location: Romania

I have reiser4 and had very few problems, most caused by X crashes or bad kernel pathes, but all togher it is stable enough to consider it.
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rmh3093 · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 2:24 pm Post subject:

i would say reiser4 is perfectly fine, most problem people experience are probably due to other faulty/experimental drivers or a poorly set up a system or a dieing hd.
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mdshort · Apprentice Joined: 06 Dec 2004 Posts: 157

Since it requires less accessing the drive, does this mean my games should run faster?
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WladyX · Guru Joined: 25 Nov 2004 Posts: 503 Location: Romania

Maybe they would load a bit faster.
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mdshort · Apprentice Joined: 06 Dec 2004 Posts: 157

Yea thats what I meant, like ut2004 has those really long loading times.
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Vagabond · Apprentice Joined: 19 Jan 2003 Posts: 192

I had bad experiences with it too, I won't even consider it again until/if it reaches the mainline kernel. They pushed it out the door too fast IMO.

Vag

liber! · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 3:26 pm Post subject:

I have had no problems running reiser4, but to be safe I don't use it for my documents (using reiserfs instead)...

Groeten,
Nathan

UB|K · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 3:35 pm Post subject:

I guess that reiser4 being stable or not greatly depends on every one experiences...
I've been running it for about 4-5 month (except /boot and my important data) without a single problem.
The best way to know is to backup important data and give a try.

Hauser · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 3:47 pm Post subject:

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).
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MrApples · Guru Joined: 13 Dec 2002 Posts: 511

i used reiser4 for about 8 months, and i just recently switched back to reiserfs, data corruption was far too prevalent, and i couldnt afford to lose any more data
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bet1m · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 5:05 pm Post subject:

if you use reiser4, always do some backups

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freelight · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 5:30 pm Post subject:

I used reiser4 since it was in beta, and the only problems I've had with it were when the system didn't shut down cleanly (the data that was recently written was gone). I considered it stable enough to put on a server I'm running (granted, it isn't mission-critical and the important data is backed up).

WladyX · Guru Joined: 25 Nov 2004 Posts: 503 Location: Romania

i'm also having the shutdown problem

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DrWoland · l33t Joined: 13 Nov 2004 Posts: 603

I'm running RR4 on 2.6.10-nitro4, some pretty crazy CFLAGS, have been compiling, burning, installing, extracting, downloading stuff and pretty much anything else you can think of. Nothing's gone wrong as of yet. Of course, it's only been ~2 weeks, but I really have NO complaints. Then again, I'm a risktaker. I took my hard-drive off the black list for the SiI3112 errata fix

codergeek42 · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 5:47 pm Post subject:

Careful though...Reiser4 is in no way supported by the Gentoo dev team, so if something breaks you're on your own....
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Chaos · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 5:58 pm Post subject:

thank you all for your responses. Right now I'm thinking about setting up either a loopback file and putting reiser4 on it or testing it out on qemu and seeing if I can break it. Last I heard most people had problems from migrating over and that new installs seemed to be generally doing fine. Certainly it has probably been one of the most controversial filesystems created in a while, if not ever for linux but I do hope they get it up to spec and into the stable branch or at least the mm patchset sometime soon.

Thanks again everyone, I would certainly love to know what more people think!

Tiger683 · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 6:09 pm Post subject:

it's already been in mm for a while...

Chaos · Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 7:16 pm Post subject:

really? I guess I should have been paying more attention

a13x · Apprentice Joined: 05 Jan 2005 Posts: 215

For me, a dream came true today, thank God. I finally installed and configured Gentoo with NPTL, udev, GCC 3.4.3, linux-2.6.11-r2-nitro1 and Reiser4. I had big problems during the install and it took me about a week to acomplish this. I used the "Stage 1 on Stage 3" install method in order to achieve this. THX guys for documenting this.

Anyway I had Gentoo with reiserfs in the past and I must admit that Reiser4 really is fast. I dunno if it's just that or a combination of all this cool bleeding edge stuff, but I'm impressed. A huge step forward for Linux.

I realize that Reiser4 can be dangerous to use so I decided to make a tarball of my install and copy it somewhere safe, weekly. Following this policy and keeping your important data on a stable filesystem like ext3 should make using Reiser4 almost risk-free.

Have phun with it, if you decide to use it.