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.
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. 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