[SGVLUG] SUSE abandoning ReiserFS

[Dustin Laurence]

On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 12:55:02PM -0700, Mike Fedyk wrote:
> 
> The revelation that reiser3 uses the BKL everywhere only makes the 
> argument stronger.

Yeah, it's surprising, and given the current CPU arch direction I
imagine that will get less and less forgivable.

That said, let's be fair: ext2 (but not ext3) still used it a while back
and may still, presumably since it is also in pretty deep maintenance
mode.  They might have decided getting rid of the BKL counts as
maintenance since then, though.  Actually, that's probably the case, it
has been some time since I knew ext2 still used it.

> I have used reiser3 before in the past and liked it until I ran into a 
> lot of problems with the reiserfsck tools.  The last time I used 
> reiserfsck, it was anything but robust with a 50% chance of needing to 
> do a meta-data reconstruction.

That is the most persistent complaint about reiser.  I may have even
seen that, since I've seen reiser have recovery trouble but don't recall
seeing it with ext.  However, unlike apparently the entire rest of the
planet I actually know my data has no statistical validity and refuse to
extrapolate from one incident to vast generalizations about Life, The
Universe, and Everything. :-)

You might have enough data to tell, I'm just poking a stick at all the
people who say "filesystem X is garbage, use Y, I had one problem with X
and none with Y."

> I don't think SUSE had a choice.

It doesn't sound like it.

> bad blocks and and power outages: "don't use xfs unless it is on RAID 
> and powered by a UPS".  It is an "enterprise" filesystem and it scales 

Yes, I found that argument compelling.

reiser also has worse latency than ext, which is why I've abandoned
reiserfs and am back to ext exclusively.

Ext2 is still lightning fast for small heavily used filesystems due to
the lack of journaling.  I like it for /tmp and such, if they're on
separate filesystems.  I admit I've never benchmarked whether this is
actually worth it in practice.

Dustin
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