On Thursday 06 Dec 2001 9:32 pm, Anders Johansson wrote:
On Thursday 06 December 2001 22.21, Tim Harrell wrote:
2) How does it get set up in /etc/fstab? Is it just a matter of changing ext2 to reiserfs?
Yes, except you should have a notail as an option.
Thanks Anders, What about the fs_passno field (the final one)? Is this relevant for a JFS or should I just change it to zero?
3) What's this I hear about tail and notail modes? I notice that mkreiserfs has a '-v format' option which can be either 1 or 2 but it explains nothing about what these mean.
-v is the version of reiserfs used. notail isn't an option to mkreiserfs, it is an option to mount. When you normally use reiser it will store small files and ends of larger files together in blocks to optimize space usage. Compare this to ext2 where is you have a 4k block size and store a 1k file you simply lose 3k. With reiser you can store 4 files of 1k each and it will use 4k.
I'll probably use the notail option given what you've said.
The problem is with the /boot directory. lilo loads before the kernel and doesn't use a file system at all. This is why you have to rerun lilo every time you make a change to your kernel or initrd. It creates a map describing exactly where on the hd the kernel and initial ramdisk is stored. This system couldn't handle the reiserfs way of storing "tails" and small files, so you had to use "notail" as a mount option to /boot (or / if you didn't have /boot as a separate partition).
I don't know if it's later versions of lilo or later versions of reiser that fixed it, but now there shouldn't be a problem with having /boot as a normal reiser partition. With 7.2 I think you did, but memory fails me a bit.
regards Anders
Cheers. I'm not switching /boot to reiser, just going to migrate the other
stuff bit by bit (starting with a scratch partition). I'm aware of the need
to loader reiser in the ramdisk to be able to allow LILO to work with it, if
I ever need to do that.
One other point - are there issues with dump/restore or tools like dd?
--
Tim Harrell