[SGVLUG] SUSE abandoning ReiserFS

[Mike Fedyk]

Dustin Laurence wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 02:22:12PM -0700, Mike Fedyk wrote:
>   
>> I may have lost ~5 filesystems because of the reiserfsck tools.  That's 
>> enough for me.
>>     
>
> It's not really enough for statistics, but I agree it's enough data to
> form some personal prejudices on.  There are lots of people who base
> such a judgement on one crash--that's why you can find people who claim
> that reiserfs and xfs are more reliable than ext3 on cheap PC hardware.
> :-)
>   

Sure I agree, not a good statistical base.  But enough for my purposes, 
especially now that the major backer (suse) of reiser3 is gone.

>   
>>> reiser also has worse latency than ext, which is why I've abandoned
>>> reiserfs and am back to ext exclusively.
>>>  
>>>       
>> What did you use to measure the latency of the filesystem, and what 
>> operations were you performing during the measurement?
>>     
>
> I'm just passing on the experience of the audio folks who want < 10ms
> of latency for hard-disk recording.  Lots of them were using reiserfs
> because it's fast, but as you know throughput is often the enemy of
> latency.  It's also the word from Andrew Morton, who told them that they
> just weren't going to be able to tune reiserfs to their satisfaction
> because of the length of some of the critical sections (I think it was,
> this is vague memory).
>
> I have a link to a post by Andrew Morton somewhere on the subject if you
> care.
>
>   

That's all I need, thanks.  It makes sense though, any code that only 
uses the BKL probably won't be tuned for short critical sections.  I 
wonder how the new BKL semaphore affects this...

>> Ext2 is on average 1.5 or more times faster than ext3.  ext2 is still 
>> the performance king to beat when you don't have to worry about what 
>> happens after a crash or power outage.
>>     
>
> That's my impression.  Nice for /tmp and such.  Also for hard disk
> recording in general (if the power dies you lose the track anyway)
> except there you need large filesystems, and fsck'ing enormous ext2
> partitions kinda sucks. :-)  I believe in practice everyone uses ext3
> for that, since again it isn't throughput they care about.
>
> I'm going to rebuild my desktop just for this sort of thing, so I've
> been thinking about what I can get away with. :-)
>   

High bandwidth Audio/Video is the arena where xfs shines.  Streaming 
writes and guaranteed bandwidth with a journal, but your data might get 
corrupted from a crash or power outage.  Give it a try.