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Novell Moves Away From ReiserFS

Posted by kdawson on Sun Oct 15, 2006 07:22 AM
from the first-domino dept.
Novell Software Linux
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?"
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Related Stories

[+] Your Rights Online: Hans Reiser Arrested On Suspicion of Murder 1651 comments
Many readers wrote about the arrest today of Hans Reiser, author of ReiserFS, by Oakland, CA police on suspicion of murdering his estranged wife. From the San Francisco Chronicle: "Hans Reiser, 42, was taken into custody at 11 a.m., hours after Oakland police and FBI technicians searched his home in the Oakland hills. His estranged wife, Nina Reiser, 31, has been missing since Sept. 3, when she dropped off the couple's son and daughter at his home on the 6900 block of Exeter Drive... Police made the arrest based on circumstantial evidence and have not found Nina Reiser's body, [Hans Reiser's attorney] Du Bois said. 'I have no idea what the circumstantial evidence is,' he said. 'When I hear what the evidence is against him, I'll make a decision as to whether he'll talk to them.'" kimvette writes, "While the disappearance (and possible murder) of his wife is tragic, Linux users will wonder where this will leave Reiser 4. If Reiser is found guilty, will Novell or IBM pick up the pieces and finish up Reiser 4 for inclusion in the kernel or is this the end of the Reiser filesystem project? Will there be any future for the Reiser filesystem, and if Hans is found guilty and the project is continued, will the project be renamed to avoid notoriety?"
[+] Hardware: The Future of ReiserFS 459 comments
lisah writes "With the announcement of Hans Reiser's arrest this week, many people have been wondering what this will mean for his company, Namesys, and the future of his filesystem work. According to a report at Linux.com, employees at Namesys are circling their wagons and plan to continue working on the project 'in the short term.' One employee admits, 'we are rather shaken and stressed at the moment, although I cannot say we didn't see it coming.'"
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  • Hurm (Score:5, Funny)

    by OverlordQ (264228) on Sunday October 15 2006, @07:27AM (#16442851) Journal
    What implications will this have for SuSE users

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

  • The Slashdot Way... (Score:5, Funny)

    by xquark (649804) on Sunday October 15 2006, @07:34AM (#16442883) Homepage
    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..

  • Old news (Score:5, Informative)

    by lintux (125434) <slashdot@@@wilmer...gaast...net> on Sunday October 15 2006, @07:44AM (#16442923) Homepage
    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. :-)

  • Nothing todo with Hans' arrest. (Score:5, Informative)

    by linuxpoweredtrekkie (659492) on Sunday October 15 2006, @08:00AM (#16442985)
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2006, @08:05AM (#16443005)
    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).

  • Thins aren't looking up for Hans. (Score:5, Informative)

    by dannycim (442761) on Sunday October 15 2006, @08:07AM (#16443007)
    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)

  • ext3 more reliable? Whatthe! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mcbridematt (544099) on Sunday October 15 2006, @08:30AM (#16443119) Homepage Journal
    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! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by asuffield (111848) <asuffield@suffields.me.uk> on Sunday October 15 2006, @09:45AM (#16443457)
      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?! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RAMMS+EIN (578166) on Sunday October 15 2006, @08:49AM (#16443209) Homepage Journal
    ``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?

  • Ending submissions with an idiotic question (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gothmolly (148874) on Sunday October 15 2006, @09:25AM (#16443359)
    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.

    • Re:It's Deja Vu All over Again (Score:5, Insightful)

      by arth1 (260657) on Sunday October 15 2006, @07:35AM (#16442887) Homepage Journal
      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

      • Hard to Believe (Score:5, Informative)

        by countach (534280) on Sunday October 15 2006, @08:55AM (#16443237)
        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 (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2006, @09:43AM (#16443445)
        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:xfs for ever (Score:5, Funny)

      by arth1 (260657) on Sunday October 15 2006, @07:44AM (#16442925) Homepage Journal
      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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cortana (588495) <samNO@SPAMrobots.org.uk> on Sunday October 15 2006, @08:22AM (#16443075) Homepage
      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 (Score:5, Interesting)

        by rg3 (858575) on Sunday October 15 2006, @10:08AM (#16443549) Homepage
        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 (Score:5, Insightful)

          by udderly (890305) on Sunday October 15 2006, @08:56AM (#16443247)
          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 (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Rob Kaper (5960) on Sunday October 15 2006, @09:31AM (#16443391) Homepage
            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 (Score:5, Informative)

            by diegocgteleline.es (653730) on Sunday October 15 2006, @10:09AM (#16443565)
            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.
    • 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.

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