Novell Moves Away From ReiserFS

VSquared56 writes, "Novell announced a shift in the default filesystem from ReiserFS to ext3 for users of its SuSE Enterprise Linux. This news comes shortly after Hans Reiser's arrest, though Novell says the decision was being considered long before. Though Novell will continue supporting ReiserFS 3, it claims ext3 is more stable and will 'soon' match performance with the newer ReiserFS 4. What implications will this have for SuSE users, and ReiserFS's future as a whole?"

Hurm

What implications will this have for SuSE users

Well, just a guess . . . but they might have to use a new filesystem!

No one laughed last time...

I wonder if Reiser 4 "file" system is hidden inside of a cake.

Novell Storage Services [NSS] R/WC/E/M/FS/AC/S?

Did Novell ever get around to porting Novell Storage Services [NSS] to Linux?

NSS was the B-Tree successor to the old allocation table NetWare file system, and it had all the permissions and attributes that were unique to the Novell World:

Read
Write
Create
Erase
Modify
File Scan
Access Control
Supervisor

So did Novell ever get around to porting an R/W/C/E/M/FS/AC/S file system to Linux, to be used in place of the standard Unix RWX/RWX/RWX file system?

And if so, is anyone out there using it?

Have you ever heard the phrase:

"Rats are the first to desert a sinking ship"?

The Slashdot Way...

I think is to have a poll as to measure people's opinions
about the guy's innocence. With options such as
1. He is innocent
2. He is guilty
3. Cowboyneal did it etc..

You're forgetting

4. The bitch set me up (Marion Barry)
5. The glove's too tight (OJ)
6. Is that Chewbacca here? (Chewbacca defense)

Re:You're forgetting

7. "I'm just a patsy-OH NO I'VE BEEN SHOT!" (Oswald defence)
8. "You want the Truth? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!" (A Few Good Men defence)
9. "I'm telling you, it wasn't me! It was a one-armed man! You've got to believe me!" (The Fugitive defence)
10. "These are not the evidence you are lookiing for" (Obi-wan defense)
11. "That depends on what the definition of 'kill' is." (The Clinton defence)
12. "Putting this 'evidence' out for anyone to read is helping our terrorist enemies." (The Bush defence)

Re:The Slashdot Way...

I think anyone capable of writing a filesystem is capable of killing a person. But also anyone writing an open source software is too kind to kill a person.

xfs for ever

why not move to xfs? it's a very good performance file system. unless there a rumours of the author being a murderer of course.

Re:xfs for ever

why not move to xfs? it's a very good performance file system.

XFS is high performance especially for large files and multitasked access.
reiserfs (3) is high performance especially for small files and singletasked access.
JFS is also a good journalled file system with many nifty features, although perhaps not as mature as XFS.

unless there a rumours of the author being a murderer of course.

Neither X nor J have been accused of murder, to my knowledge.

All hail J.

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:xfs for ever

There have been too many reports in the last couple of months of people whose machines have lost power, and booted up, only to find that every file on their XFS filesystems has been filled with zeroes.

Re:xfs for ever

For the record, I was also quite underwhelmed by XFS. The Gentoo people, I think, wrote that XFS is primarily to large files and *only* if you have an UPS (and proper shutdown control). The problem is that it (quite aggressively) cache write-data; I have seen data disappear which was written nearly 2 hours before. I am quite happy with ext3. Reiserfs had a nasty tendency to slowly deteriorate over time, becoming slower and slower.

Re:xfs for ever

Slashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters. Anecdote Battles.

Re:xfs for ever

If you don't know what you are doing, do not listen to zealots. Stick with the distro default -- which is EXT3/

If you don't know what you are doing, you should stick with the default "distro".
And Microsoft recommends NTFS.

Re:xfs for ever

What good is a UPS going to do in the case the machine powers off because of a problem with the power unit, a motherboard short circuit, and so on? Any filesystem with serious data loss on a power failure is not acceptable, period.

Re:xfs for ever

AFAIK this is a design flaw in XFS

No, this happens because it's the way XFS does journalling.

XFS journalling isn't as good as the one in ext3, from users' POV. Ext3 default journaling mode takes care of the relationship between metadata and the data associated to that metadata (and here let me remember that journalling/softupdates is a way to avoid corruption of the *metadata*, if you lose data because of a power cut that's fine, but it's not fine that the filesystem gets damaged and needs fsck because the metadata got corrupted)

IOW: when ext3 is going to write metadata to the disk, it looks first to the dirty data cached in the memory and writtes the data *before* it writes the metadata.

XFS journaling, in the other hand, does *not* care about writing the data before the metadata. Why? Well, because journalling is about keeping the metadata safe so you don't need fsck. This means that in case of a power cut, XFS may leave the contents of a "file" (metadata) unscycrhonized with its data. Because of that, the metadata may be pointing to random free zone of the disc with confidential information (passwords) which was deleted but it has not been overwritten, so XFS sets it to zero for safety. Ext3, on the other hand, will never left your data "unscychornised" with your metadata. The file may get corrupted because the program that was manipulating it was stopped in the power cut, but the relationship between the data and the metadata is always coherent.

Ext3 journaling mode may be considered an "extra", and it *does* pay a performance disadvantage because of this. If you want ext3 to behave like xfs (and get better performance), mount your fs with the mount option "data=writeback". Reiserfs in the other hand historically had a similar journaling method as XFS (just like JFS), but the suse guys created a journaling mode similar to the default one in ext3 which AFAIK is not enabled by default (at least on mainline) and gets enabled with "data=ordered"

Is the XFS journaling mode worse? Well, for desktop users, who would rather have syncronized their data and their metadata, clearly yes. This is why XFS is just not the best FS for desktops - its a wonderful FS, but just not "optimized" for desktops. NTFS journaling does the same that ext3 does, BTW, and it's for a reason.

Re:xfs for ever

That's what backups are for. Seriously, with XFS you run a very real risk of zeroing out a file if the file system isn't shut down properly.

OMG, are you kidding? If it was NTFS or FAT, people on /. would be going crazy about it. It would be more famous than the BSoD.

Re:xfs for ever

It's interesting that you mention that. Some time ago, I used ReiserFS as the filesystem on my laptop computer (I only have one partition, not counting swap). The performance was alright and it always took some seconds to mount the partition (this is a known thing for ReiserFS). So, more or less, my experience had been fine. One day, I was trying to view one JPG file and the program was unable to open it, so I wondered why. After examining the file, I found out that while the file size was alright, its contents were all binary zeros. I discovered similar things for a handful of files in my system, many of them in my home directory, I supposed because that's where the biggest part of the disk data is located and if a problem arose, it's probably going to be there.

At the beginning I suspected something had gone wrong while copying the data to an external USB hard drive and back to the newly formatted ReiserFS partition. But, some weeks later, I discovered a similar situation in a file I had created recently (after the data move), and that had been available there for many days. I am only a desktop user and I lack evidence on what caused this, but I tested my harddrive to see if it had bad sectors or behaved poorly for some reason, and nothing turned up. I fsck'ed the partition and everything was alright. I suspected this problem was due to ReiserFS, so I took the decision of switching back to ext3 with dir_index activated, and the problem hasn't reappeared again. I suspect I hit a bug in the ReiserFS code, and I lost my data in one or several of those ocasions when I left my laptop alone for some time and it powered off suddenly when it ran out of battery. This happened more times since the switch to ext3, but I haven't lost any more files since then.

I know this can be a particular case which may not represent the behaviour of ReiserFS, but as I read your comment I thought I had to share my experience too.

Re:xfs for ever

Yup, no surprise there. XFS caches writes very agressively in ram, around 50MB if not more, for long periods of times. So it "feels" fast but really isn't in some aspects.

So you pop the power off and *wham* bye bye cached data. This is definately not any kind of fun.

XFS was written for environments where the power just dooes not go out -- datacenters, people with a very good UPS etc. I generally recommend XFS for people with lots of large files, but if they don't have a good power backup, I change my mind.

Re:xfs for ever

Neither xfs nor jfs partitions can be reduced. This may not be a big deal to compaines who just add disks and expand their partitions, but I know that I lost about two hundred gig worth of data that would probably still be around if I could have reduced my jfs partition. After that I tried to install ReiserFS then Reiser4, and after a little bit of trouble with those, decided I'd use Ext3 because it just works. Even if its performance isn't as great as some other file systems, I don't know too many people who have lost data because of flaws (or "features") of the filesystem.

Rats first and Captain last

At least that's what happens to a sinking ship. A maintainer going missing does not quite instill the users with confidence, especially when it is happening due to reasons other than flagging interest. Most commercial distributions have SLAs which sort of work against such brilliant work by an individual contributor - they just can't depend on the whims of a person or his fate.

One of my friends once told me that "Extraordinary hackers are people with socially acceptable problems". In fact to achieve what they feel they must, a lot of them give up a lot - health, social lives and financial security. But because a few do that, does not mean FOSS programmers are crackpots [gmane.org]. And I say this as a son who's home (which I can because my commits go to a public CVS) watching over a sick father.

So as understandable as it is that commercial vendors might want to switch away, but that doesn't mean anyone gets to shine a torch or make jokes [reboot.net.au] into somebody else's darkness.

Re:Rats first and Captain last

Almost right, but the fact is Hans Reiser wasn't reisersfs3 maintainer. He long ago declared version 3 was dead and only reiser4fs worth using. reiserfs3 was maintained mainly by one guy in SUSE, who became fed up with it. And rightly recomended going to ext3/ext4.

Just BTW, I am using reiserfs3 on my system and I thinking about migration to some FS with future.

Explain to me, please

it claims ext3 is more stable and will 'soon' match performance with the newer ReiserFS 4

ext3 will match reiserfs4? how? when? are they talking about ext4?

Old news

This news comes shortly after Hans Reiser's arrest

That news was this week. This news from SuSE, however, is very old [wordpress.com] already and apparently they indeed decided about this before Reiser got arrested.

It's also interesting how people now explain the blood on Reiser's shirt in this comic [geekz.co.uk], while this comic also predates this whole arrest story. :-)

arrest aside...

It seems that ReiserFS really depends on 1 guy. For any company this is a risk. It sounds reasonable to me to stay away from products and features like that.

Nothing todo with Hans' arrest.

Several commenters appear to think that this is due to the arrest of Hans, In fact it was announced over a month ago, before any of the stories about Hans broke. The original announcement is from the 14th september http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2006-09 /msg00542.html [opensuse.org]

Smart move, just a little late

When it comes to performance between the filesystems (reiser vs. ext3 vs. xfs) then I don't have much to comment, but with regards to security... I've used reiser for quite some time but in the end threw it away because it just couldn't cope with what I wanted..

First your average backup. Yes, I'm well aware that you can always tools like tar but really.. Its the same deal with Sun's current development ZFS: it lacks the option to decently make a backup. Yes you can use tar, but I don't consider this decent. I'm talking about tools like backup/restore (ext3) or even native "ports" like xfsdump/xfsrestore. Easy, fast and reliable. Make a whole dump (or increamental), you can then either restore the whole session or use an interactive shell to merely grab the file(s) you're after. Naturally it also supports commandline parameters. And Reiser? IIRC (correct me if I'm wrong please) its even longer around than xfs, and even xfs managed to get me something decent for making backups...

Last but not least; crash recovery. I know, this is threading on thin ice since these results cannot be reproduced perse but the whole nature of reiser makes it good and bad for workstations (like SuSE). The good part is its speed, the way it caches and writes data in such a way where it tries to store things in one specific part makes it faster. I can't comment if reiser really is faster than others, I never noticed it. But the bad part is also that if you have a crash on your hands (just turn of your computer right now. No, not a shutdown but keep the powerbutton pressed untill it goes "poof") and reboot chances are very high that you just lost valuable data.

The theory behind journaling should give you some protection against this, and normally it does, but its my experience that whenever something like this happened on a box which was using reiser I lost just too many files. Several files in /etc used to become corrupt, binaries started going haywire and the worst part: because the index wasn't affected it was quite hard to detect these bad files.

Eventually I moved to XFS myself and never bothered looking back. Its not perfect, absolutely not since on XFS you too can experience situations like I just described. But in that same environment where I sometimes had to endure a powerloss I noticed that the frequency in which my data became corrupt was far and far less than with reiser. So my conclusion: reiser isn't the best when it comes to keeping your data safe. Its also a conclusion which has been backed up by other people who experiences the same problems in a more or lesser degree.

So my comment: finally Novell is coming to its senses. IMO they should have done this years ago, either going to XFS (my favorite) or ext3 where the latter is ofcourse the most logical choice considering how this evolved from ext2 (which, strangely enough, used to be the default on SuSE. I never did understand why they'd move away from it).

Re:Smart move, just a little late

Let me start by saying I'm not disagreeing with you, just pointing out that different people may have different experiences (AKA YMMV).

``First your average backup. Yes, I'm well aware that you can always tools like tar but really.. Its the same deal with Sun's current development ZFS: it lacks the option to decently make a backup. Yes you can use tar, but I don't consider this decent. I'm talking about tools like backup/restore (ext3) or even native "ports" like xfsdump/xfsrestore. Easy, fast and reliable. Make a whole dump (or increamental), you can then either restore the whole session or use an interactive shell to merely grab the file(s) you're after. Naturally it also supports commandline parameters. And Reiser? IIRC (correct me if I'm wrong please) its even longer around than xfs, and even xfs managed to get me something decent for making backups...''

I believe backup tools that depend on the specifics of filesystems are a bad idea.

When you go looking for filesystem-independent backup tools, I'm sure you'll find plenty (the recent thread here on Slashdot may be a good starting point). I myself keep most of my data in Subversion repositories and databases; backups are made through the appropriate backup tools. Whatever is left on the filesystem is synchronized between a couple of computers using rsync.

``The good part is its speed, the way it caches and writes data in such a way where it tries to store things in one specific part makes it faster. I can't comment if reiser really is faster than others, I never noticed it.''

In the tests I ran, it wiped the floor with ext2 and (OpenBSD) ffs, especially when extracting lots of small files. I have no idea how it compares to more modern filesystems like XFS, ZFS, etc.

``But the bad part is also that if you have a crash on your hands (just turn of your computer right now. No, not a shutdown but keep the powerbutton pressed untill it goes "poof") and reboot chances are very high that you just lost valuable data.''

Although I have lost files on ReiserFS partitions, I've lost way more on ext2 and (especially) HFS+ partitions.

``The theory behind journaling should give you some protection against this, and normally it does, but its my experience that whenever something like this happened on a box which was using reiser I lost just too many files. Several files in /etc used to become corrupt, binaries started going haywire and the worst part: because the index wasn't affected it was quite hard to detect these bad files.''

Often when files seem to be missing after a crash, fsck has been able to recover them for me. This goes for ext2, reiserfs, ffs, and hfs+. Reiserfs is the only one of these on which I have never gotten the filesystem so broken it couldn't be fixed anymore.

In case people are wondering where I get my data from: I work with a lot of old hardware which sometimes fails, laptops that run out of battery or are dropped on the floor, accidentally unplugged power cables, and the occasional unclean shutdown.

RTFM

Its the same deal with Sun's current development ZFS: it lacks the option to decently make a backup.

See Solaris ZFS Administration Guide, Chapter 6 Working With ZFS Snapshots and Clones [sun.com].

Thins aren't looking up for Hans.

Geez, now blood's found in his car, and with the passenger seat missing [mercurynews.com], history of abuse, guy is arrested with $8,900 and his passport on him...

If he were a famous football player, he'd have a chance, but I don't think a filesystem developer can muster up a "dream team".

I expect other distros will knee-jerk too.

$ mount /dev/hda3 on / type reiserfs (rw)

Is the charge worth getting rid of a product?

Come on now, just cause someones charged with murder, should that really stop the progress of technology? I can see changing the name if he's convicted, but what happened to innocent until proven guilty...

XFS anyone?

Why not move it to XFS? This says "commercial production ready" to me.

ext3 more reliable? Whatthe!

it claims ext3 is more stable and will 'soon' match performance with the newer ReiserFS 4.

Gee, ext3 must've matured a lot in the past few years. I stopped using extX filesystems long ago because they lost files after power cuts waay too easily. ( I could bork an old RedHat install simply by pulling the plug/rebooting several times ). Moved to reiser then xfs and barely lost anything if I had to force a reboot.

Re:ext3 more reliable? Whatthe!

I stopped using extX filesystems long ago because they lost files after power cuts waay too easily.

That's still better than reiserfs, which does not need a power cut in order to lose data. I still recall a comment from a tech support area I used to frequent: "reiserfs runs really fast until it crashes and you lose all your data. As a result it has a lot of ex-users who are now sadder but wiser."

It is also important to remember that ext3 can be configured for a number of different points along the speed/safety tradeoff, so any stories about problems (with speed *or* safety) should state which mode they were using.

ext3 Performance Matches Reiser4?!

``ext3 is more stable and will 'soon' match performance with the newer ReiserFS 4''

Huh? In whose benchmarks? What about space usage? What about plugins for arbitrary attributes?

Re:ext3 Performance Matches Reiser4?!

Perhaps. But the single most valuable thing about both Reiser filesystems is how well they handle large numbers of small files. I hate Berkeley DB and its ilk with a passion. They take all kinds of valuable data that should be addressable with standard tools and obscure it in some weird format that I can't make any sense of without some specialized set of tools. Not only that, but they're slow!

I want to stop using these awful things. I want to use a hierarchical naming scheme to address the individual bits of data I'm stuffing into the filesystem without having to resort to stupid tricks with splitting up the name so I don't have anymore than 256 entries per directory.

None of the filesystems made for Linux aside from ReiserFS seem to even acknolwedge that this problem is worth solving. Personally, I think it is a major, short-sighted bellybutton gazing failure. The excuse seems to be "Well, you're using the filesystem in a strange way that nobody uses it in, so stop doing that!". But that's a completely circular argument. I simply do not WANT to contort my programs in such a ridiculous way to accomodate the failings of filesystem designs.

ReiserFS is fast and flexible. I've never had any data loss with 3. At least, not in the last 3 years or so. And I have a machine that will (for reasons of a bad motherboard) randomly lock up if I'm using both the disk and the Ethernet card heavily.

I don't really care that much about plug-ins. They're kind of a neat idea for having super-efficient storage for caches and stuff, but really I just want to be able to independently address millions of small pieces of data and have it be reasonably efficient.

Hans Reiser

some thoughts about him [blogspot.com]

Symptoms and Causes

What implications will this have for SuSE users, and ReiserFS's future as a whole?

Assuming this wasn't a rhetorical question, I'd say the answer is that the ReiserFS will be impacted only slightly by Novell's decision. The far bigger impact will be from a criminal conviction. Free Software is about community and community is all about those subjective intangibles like reputation, "coolness", and mob effects.

Whether we like it or not, this highlights a serious problem with the development model. Likewise, it indirectly highlights one of its strengths. Free software programmers are very much pack animals, like the rest of us. We tend to folllow the herd (I don't mean that in the modern "bad" sense of the phrase. We stick with those we know and enjoy hanging with. We do things we perceive subjectively as fun or cool. We join projects that interest us, we leave projects that offend or dissappoint or bore us. With the GPL, a company that relies on a no-longer-cool project can always pick up the banner and try to reinvigorate interest, but in the end the projects that have momentum have it because they have that special unnamable something that brings people to the fold.

Ubuntu got the right press from the right people at the right time. Is it better than Fedora or Mandriva or whatever? Of course not. But it's market mindshare is through the roof from a perfect storm of developers that got interested in the things Mark Shuttleworth was preaching. They were NOT tempted by technology. The followed the herd, and lo and behold, now Ubuntu Is doing technically cool things. Now, with all this backing and interest, they ARE moving ahead of Fedora and Mandriva in some core ways. That happens in Free software. It does not ever happen in proprietary software, which is purely driven by corporate interest.

If the ReiserFS falls it will be for the same reason we will eventually have an iPod Killer---because eventually the cool kids that tend to lead the pack will decide there are better things to do. A murder conviction might just cause that. Novell's decision is a symptom of that, not a cause of it.

Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/ [digitalelite.com]

Not a whole of problem

One thing that's great (and not so great) about Linux distributions is that the filesystems are largely decoupled from the block device. Unlike AIX in which the FS and volume type are set just about joined at birth, with Linux you can put almost any filesystem on any device. This means that the tools are more generic (and maybe not as easy to use) but it gives great flexibility. For SuSe, the troubleshooting and command line tools may change slightly, but for the most part there will be no difference for the majority of users. In fact, in my SuSe build I chose ext3 because I'm more comfortable with it.

ReiserFS EOL?

Perhaps the reason SUSE will be moving away from ReiserFS has to do not so much with Hans Reiser's arrest, but with the fact that Namesys (developers of ReiserFS) has been focussing their attention and resources on Reiser4 (the successor of the old ReiserFS) for...what? a number of _years_, now?

ReiserFS v3 not maintained by Reiser

Novell and previously SUSE have basically been maintaining the version of ReiserFS in the mainline kernel. The choice is easy keep maintaining an FS yourself or use a maintained FS. Whatever the performance or other issues ext3 is the best maintained FS in the kernel.

Ending submissions with an idiotic question

Editors, if you're the ones doing it, please stop. If submitters are doing it, please edit their submissions. We don't need this Roland Piquipaille/Ric Romero style of foolishness, i.e. "Blah blah has happened to company FOO, what do you all think?" Posting it for discussion on Slashdot IMPLIES you're going to get a million different viewpoints, none of which are really important to the submitter. You'll get the viewpoints anyway, you don't need to "prompt" us for them.

bummer of a downgrade

Ouch! That would be very sad if SuSE actually backs away from a modern filesystem, to go back to ext2(3,4, etc).

So much for forward progression for Linux.

Maybe we should look at vfat instead ... there used to be a lot of people using it, so it must be good.

A sad day for SuSE, and a sad day for the future of linux.

uncertainty

I don't think it's so much that ext3 is more stable than Reiserfs, just that extX has a future (or two futures, to be more precise) whereas the future of ReiserX is a little uncertain at the moment.

ext3 to match ReiserFS 4?

That does seem a little unlikely. Isn't ext3 still basically ext2 with journaling? How are they still making such progress with it that performance will soon match a modern filesystem like Reiser4, which among other things has a more optimized disk layout and will have transparent compression? If there are patches to bring those to ext3, they're neither stable nor ext2 compatible, which are supposed to be ext3's advantage.
(Meh. Upon RTFA'ing I see what they meant was that ext3 will "soon" match the performance of ReiserFS (3), and that it is still more stable than Reiser4. The summary still deserves the rant, and I'm actually curious about how they are improving performance in ext3 nowadays, so I'm still posting this.)

didn't work out for me...

i was using reiser since it was default with suse 10.1. i moved to ubuntu, for which i had do to a hard-reboot once - and it caused errors fsck just couldn't repair and i couldn't boot. i could access files from a windows reiserfs tool however, so recovered some and i'm happy with ext3 and ubuntu :)

We'll match ReiserFS "Real Soon Now"

Yeah, sure... call me when that happens.

GJC

From the Horse's Mouth

I wrote the original email proposing that SUSE switch from reiserfs to ext3. At the risk of triggering responses of "The lady doth protest too much," I'll restate a few statements I've made elsewhere in response to common questions:

1) The decision has *nothing* to do with Hans' situation. The email was released on the same day as the initial story broke, but it was pointed out to me after I had sent the email. I was concerned then, correctly as it turns out, that people would consider the two issues intertwined. They're not. My proposal was based on technical and maintainability reasons alone. The timing is an extremely unfortunate coincidence.

2) SUSE is *not* dropping reiser3 support. This change only affects the default. It doesn't change our support of reiser3 at all. We still support four major file systems: ext3, reiserfs, xfs, and ocfs2. Our installer offers other file systems as well as a convenience, and users are free to use any of them. So, if you're committed to reiser3 or xfs, nothing is stopping you from continuing to deploy systems using them.

3) Many benchmarks show reiser3 as performing better than ext3, and this is mostly true. What isn't shown in those benchmarks is that if you're operating two or more reiser3 file systems in parallel, performance will degrade for both of them due to the use of BKL everywhere. ext3 (and other file systems) will don't degrade in that case. I've also read reports that there is a bit of research going on into making ext3 locking finer grained. I don't have any sources to cite, but any reduction of critical sections without reducing reliability is always a good thing.

People refer to reiser3 as a modern file system, but I'd call it progressive. Reiser3 has served us well for years, but it's showing its age. The basic idea behind reiser3 is still sound, and when extended with integrated integrity checking and better b-tree locking borrowed from years of database research, it would perform extremely well. The problem is that adding the first is a huge disk format change, which means it's no longer reiser3. Adding the second is a hugely invasive change that would throw out a good chunk of the existing code -- again, essentially creating a new file system. It would be like people saying, "I like my ext3 file system, but I don't like the code. Let's start over." Combined with a small development community, it's a recipe for instability and there are more interesting problems out there.

I've posted some more lengthy comments here: http://linux.wordpress.com/2006/09/27/suse-102-dit ching-reiserfs-as-it-default-fs/#comment-28534 [wordpress.com]

What's ReiserFS?

Honestly, I've been using SUSE for a few years now as my full-time system. I couldn't tell you that I was using reiser except for the fact that I read up on this.

In other words, for most of us everyday SUSE users, I doubt a switch from Reiser to EXT or JFS or whatever will mean anything. As long as my system works and works faster than Wintendo, I'm happy.

Oh, and for the record - I think OJ did it.

Wasted space

ReiserFS is touted to be a zero-slack filesystem, whereas ext3 still ties up entire blocks (groups of sectors, usually 4K, 8K, 16K depending on formatting options) on, say, a 1k text file, or a file which spills over into a tiny fraction of another block. When you have thousands of files which take up only a portion of a block, resulted in a lot of wasted space (how many files are exact multiples of the block size?). Some may argue "yeah, but disk space is cheap" but even so, 750GB drives are the largest we can buy now (yeah I know, RAIDs, but the point still remains), and if you fill it up doing projects and need just 80MB additional space to complete a job, a 300MB of allocated space is unused portions of blocks (slack), it sucks knowing that you could have finished a job if the filesystem weren't so inefficient.

Strange Original Decision for Novell

When I was introduced to the new Novell releases based around Linux I was very surprised indeed that ReiserFS was the default. I know you can't judge a book (in this case Hans and his filesystem) by its cover, but I think a public company would make more conservative decisions given some of the negativity (both technical and non-technical) related to ReiserFS.

I always had the impression that the filesystem and its development were more cutting edge than a commericial software company would feel comfortable with.

It just begs to be said...

What implications will this have for SuSE users...

One-third of them will have to reformat and reinstall to get everything on ext3. The other two SuSE users won't have to change anything.

bada-BING!

Rubbish

Ext3, in contrast, is stable and likely will match ReiserFS's performance advantages "soon."

Rubbish. Ext3 has never been able to match Reiser's performance on small files or in other areas, and the notion that ext3 is going to match it is absurd. Even ext4 is not likely to catch up. A lot of ext developers have bizarre ideas about how their filesystem compares to Reiser, XFS or even JFS in a lot of areas. Ext is simply a stable and solid, but badly evolved, filesystem and it is a filesystem that generates an awful lot of disk activity.

XFS

I havent experienced any data loss with XFS when I do an improper shutdown or reboot. This is probably because I disabled write-caching. So now changes are immediately written to the disk rather than the disk cache, but at a cost of performance. In the event of a power outage or crash data would already be permanently stored.

ReiserFS is great, don't kill it, just rename it!

The good thing about open source is that if a person goes rogue, their code can be taken over by someone else and their existence erased from history. Just call it "NewFS" or something. "Someday we may catch up with ReiserFS" That is insane. Just use ReiserFS and give it a new name.

Specialists vs generalists

it claims ext3 .. will 'soon' match performance with the newer ReiserFS 4.

This simply won't happen. There are lots of choices in filesystem development, and if your application doesn't match the choices that were made, then that filesystem won't be best, or "match" the specialist that did make matching choices.

There is no way that Extn will ever match, for example, ReiserFS' performance on working with a directory full of ten thousand 700-byte-long files. ReiserFS will do directory-related things faster, and tail-compression will save you space (and therefore give you even more performance, thanks to caching).

I don't have a problem with SUSE picking something else, though, because my whole point is that, no matter what FS you pick, if the default configuration is that the installer just formats the whole disk as one filesystem, then no filesystem is going to be ideal in all cases.

Of course, the Gentoo Ricer approach is to break your disk array up into little pieces, so you're using performance-over-safety filesystems on the RAID0 parts, using safety-over-performance filesystems on the RAID1 and RAID10 parts, and compromise filesystems on the RAID5 parts -- and within each group there is a variety of different formatting and mounting options used. (Not to mention a little tmpfs here and there; not everything has to survive a reboot.) Yeah, df lists 20 different mountpoints, every part of the hierarchy "optimized" (*cough*) for what it gets used for.

Now I just need some good-looking stickers to put on the outside of the case, and it'll be even faster! Yeah, next weekend I'll probably spend a few more hours changing something, but for the next 5 days I'll be pretty smug about every millisecond I save.

Wait a minute...

I did read about that before that murder story. I think it was on Heise.de. I think that conclusively proves it has nothing to do with that.

Ah yes, here we go: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/result.xhtml?url=%2 Fnewsticker%2Fmeldung%2F79035&words=Reiser [heise.de] - that was dated 10/04, 7 days before the murder story broke.

Please, Linus, Don't!

Please, Linus, don't murder anybody!

                                                  -- a Linux user.

I can relate

Late last year I was researching Reiserfs and Ext3 to see which would be best suited for my new server.

Resierfs looked like the clear winner for two good reasons:

1. Reiserfs is faster. Much faster than ext3 in nearly every scenario. Large files and small files.
2. No inode problems. If your users fill your HD with hundreds of thousands of tiny files you're not going to run out of inodes before you run out of disk space. This is something that needs to be anticipated (at the cost of more disk space) at filesystem creation time in ext3.

Reliability for both filesystems was pretty much the same from all accounts.

But in the end I went with ext3 for one and only one reason: Recoverability.

Reiserfs had no, or very few decent, recovery utilities. If a filesystem corruption occurred (and it seemed that the probablity of such corruptions was equal for both filesystems), then data on an ext3 fs stands a much better chance of being recovered than on a reiserfs one.

Of course that was late 2005; that situation may have changed by now.

This opens the door for SELinux

Doesn't SELinux require the use of ext3 or xfs?

Re:It's Deja Vu All over Again

I predicted this a few days ago, when I wrote here:

That it /is/ going to damage reiserfs is beyond any doubt, no matter whether he's proven innocent, not proven guilty, or proven guilty. The name is tainted, and a business executive will not likely touch anything related to that person, no matter whether it gets taken over and run by other people or not.

This was modded flamebait.

People, you might not want to hear it, and you might not agree with stupid knee-jerk reactions, but these reactions will be coming. The name "reiserfs" is tainted, whether that's rational or not.

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:It's Deja Vu All over Again

Unfortunately, I hate to agree with you, but it's true. If they project renames and then it continues, it might get picked up again.

The other concern is going to be about support, if Hans is found guilty or not, it doesn't really matter. A company such as Novell may consider that the filesystem platform isn't as supported as what it once was and is moving away from it.

From a marketing point of view, Novell won't want to associated with it either. If they show support for him, and he is found guilty, it's a marketing nightmare for Novell.

Re:Just rename it

I hope he is not guilty; I hope that his wife simply tried to pull a scam and is actually OK and is found hiding in Russia or somewhere. Even though it'd have been a scummy thing for her to do, at least their kids would not have lost their mother. That's the single worst part of the whole thing -- oh wait, am I saying "think of the children?" Shoot me now, please!

Re:It's Deja Vu All over Again

From a marketing point of view, Novell won't want to associated with it either. If they show support for him, and he is found guilty, it's a marketing nightmare for Novell.

Are you kidding - this stuff practically writes itself.

1. "Novell and ReiserFS - we have THE killer linux filesystem!"
2. "Novell and ReiserFS - your files are as secure as the county lockup."
3. "Novell and ReiserFS - while the jury's out, we continue give you a choice of file systems"
4. "Novell and ReiserFS - exabytes of data - and only one piece of information missing ..."
5. "Novell and ReiserFS - no dead inodes, no dead files, no dead bodies ..."
6. "Novell and ReiserFS - what the fsck?"

Not just the name...

I've been to the namesys [namesys.com] website and haven't found anything about the Hans Reiser arrest. If it is more than a one man show, then they should have a prominent statement about their intention to continue development regardless of the outcome. Not seeing something to that effect after this mych time would make me quite nervous if I had a business or product that relied on continued development of the ReiserFS line. Seems as if Namesys is accepting the inevitable demise of the whole organization at this point; I hope that changes.

Hard to Believe

Not that I've got my finger right on the pulse of FS development, but I find it hard to believe that ext3 is soon going to equal Reiserfs for all cases. Perhaps for a typical case, but ReiserFS was supposed to allow a lot of stuff that was not feasible with ext3 like efficiently having really small files, using the FS as a database, and a lot of other potentially groundbreaking research and abilities. I hope none of the good ideas get lost.

Re:It's Deja Vu All over Again

The name "reiserfs" is tainted, whether that's rational or not.

Apparently it is to be called "icefs" in Etch.

Something to do with Hans not being available to QA patches by the Debian kernel team.

Re:It's Deja Vu All over Again

What would happen if (god forbid) Linus were in Reiser's place? Would everyone here be distancing themselves from using Linux? Would Novell, IBM, etc. abandon the use of Linux, throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

This is why when the story hit I posed legitimate questions regarding the filesystem's future (and got flamed for it, BTW, here and on linuxquestions); a person's career work should be viewed independently of his or her personal misdeeds. Otherwise, we should abandon electricity and incandescent lights (Edison was a bit of a bastard, and his invention of the electric chair "tainted" AC), jets (Heinkel was a nazi), Mercury and Apollo programs should never have happened (Wernher von Braun, the brain behind those programs, was a nazi, willing or otherwise). There are many, many worthwhile inventions proposed, designed, and/or implemented by evil people, and yet we use them on a daily basis, because regardless of the creators' nature, philosophy, or misdeeds, they have produced some worthwhile things that abandoning them because of the heritage would be somewhere between silly and irresponsible.

Re:Let this be a lesson to you all

Crime does not pay!

Ok, ReiserFS might be a bit on the slow and unstable side, but I would not actually call it a crime.

Re:conversion

Can you even dump in one fs format and restore in another?

Re:conversion

Yes, in fact someone made a command to do just that: `cp`

Re:conversion

why would you convert your file system? There is no reason to unless you are actually having issues with it.

Re:And then

He will go to jail for a very long time

If found guilty, probably jail for a very long time followed by execution. California has capital punishment.

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:Novell?

They owned UNIXWARE.

Too Silly! Too silly! Stop it this instance!

Re:That's fine.

That's funny... exactly the same reasons I dumped Windows.

Re:That's fine.

Stop crying and switch. Troll.

Re:Let this be a lesson to you all

Umm, whatever ever happened to innocent until proven guilty? I agree there may be a good chance Reiser did it, but I think there's also reasonable doubt he didn't.

Re:Think of the women!

"Object not found"

Did you link to his wife?