[opensuse] reiser and ext3 confusion

primm

17 Aug 2007 17 Aug '07

13:11

I upgraded some lan clients to 10.2. I notice that new installs use ext3. Is the latter better? Faster? Is there a problem with reiser? Why did suse change it? My nfs server is cli 7.2 with ext2. Is it wise to export nfs between differing filesystems? Or can I assume that if it isn't broke then don't fix it? Cheers, Steve. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

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Jan Engelhardt

17 Aug 17 Aug

13:21

On Aug 17 2007 15:11, primm wrote:

...

I upgraded some lan clients to 10.2. I notice that new installs use ext3. Is the latter better? Faster? Is there a problem with reiser?

http://lwn.net/Articles/202780/ Summary: It does not scale. For uniprocessor, it should not make much difference. But reiser3 horribly bogs down on multi-core servers, for example during kernel compiles after a tarball was extracted (which is what happens with `rpmbuild kernel-default.spec`.)

...

Why did suse change it? My nfs server is cli 7.2 with ext2. Is it wise to export nfs between differing filesystems? Or can I assume that if it isn't broke then don't fix it?

"If it ain't b'roque, don't fix it." (Cogsworth from "Beauty and the Beast".) NFS does not care about filesystems. But I'd really upgrade that olde 7.2 to something that is actually security-supported. Jan -- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Clayton

13:53

...

...
I upgraded some lan clients to 10.2. I notice that new installs use ext3. Is the latter better? Faster? Is there a problem with reiser?

http://lwn.net/Articles/202780/ Summary: It does not scale. For uniprocessor, it should not make much difference. But reiser3 horribly bogs down on multi-core servers, for example during kernel compiles after a tarball was extracted (which is what happens with `rpmbuild kernel-default.spec`.)

I am one of goofs who is hanging onto Reiser v3.... my excuse is that it seems to survive reboots (intentional or otherwise) a lot more elegantly than ext. That is a bit of a lame excuse I know... My experience with ext dates back to my early days with SUSE (6.x timeframe) when I was doing a lot of booting back and forth between Windows and SUSE. Every 10th boot ext would drop into its sanity check routine and my boot cycle would take what felt like forever while it did a filesystem scan. I also had a lot of crashes and forced reboots and got to know fsck far too intimately. This has put me off using ext on my systems. A few questions... What is the default for ext3 in SUSE? Journal, Ordered or Writeback? What about defragmentation? As far as I know, ext3 cannot be properly defragmented either on the fly or off line. (Also none for Reiser, but I find that Resier tends to stay relatively neat and tidy... for the most part). Is file fragmentation on ext3 something a user needs to think about? Does ext still default to doing a filesystem scan on every 10th or 20th boot? If it does, what do you recommend for computers that are booted up and turned off on a regular basis (like laptops)? I am helping a friend convert his laptop to openSUSE10.2 this weekend... so file system choice is on my mind. Upgrade from ext2 to ext3 to ext4 is not much of an issue so not a reason to choose ext3 here - neither is scalability since it's just a laptop. I need something that will give little trouble with things like sudden unintentional powerdowns - something Reiser usually survives nicely with a journal replay on boot after an uncontrolled shutdown. What can happen with ext3 after an uncontrolled power off? Does it survive as cleanly as Reiser does (usually) or are you usually back to booting a rescue system and forcing an fsck to be able to remount the filesystem? (this is a situation I don't want for this new user if I can avoid it, and was my experience waaaay back when I used ext) C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Jan Engelhardt

14:19

On Aug 17 2007 15:53, Clayton wrote:

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What is the default for ext3 in SUSE? Journal, Ordered or Writeback?

I suppose whatever is ext3's default.

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What about defragmentation? As far as I know, ext3 cannot be properly defragmented either on the fly or off line. (Also none for Reiser, but I find that Resier tends to stay relatively neat and tidy... for the most part). Is file fragmentation on ext3 something a user needs to think about?

Almost no filesystem does defragmentation. In fact, they just allocate things smart in the first place.

...

Does ext still default to doing a filesystem scan on every 10th or 20th boot?

IIRC it does.

...

If it does, what do you recommend for computers that are booted up and turned off on a regular basis (like laptops)?

Of the stable ones? jfs, xfs. Of the ones in development? reiser4, btrfs ;-)

...

I am helping a friend convert his laptop to openSUSE10.2 this weekend... so file system choice is on my mind. Upgrade from ext2 to ext3 to ext4 is not much of an issue so not a reason to choose ext3 here - neither is scalability since it's just a laptop. I need something that will give little trouble with things like sudden unintentional powerdowns - something Reiser usually survives nicely with a journal replay on boot after an uncontrolled shutdown.

...

What can happen with ext3 after an uncontrolled power off? Does it survive as cleanly as Reiser does (usually) or are you usually back to booting a rescue system and forcing an fsck to be able to remount the filesystem? (this is a situation I don't want for this new user if I can avoid it, and was my experience waaaay back when I used ext)

After an fs repair, I'd always reboot, unless you can really unmount the mount. Which you cannot with your root vfsmount (it will just switch to readonly) unless you use tricks that are reserved for the true linux gods. (Then again, rebooting is faster than trying to play with pivot_root.) The question is what happens to <any filesystem> after an uncontrolled power off. reiser4 advertises atomicity "either it's there, or it's not", other filesystems have something similar. Then things get worse, like a file whose data pointer points nowhere because we were just writing it, etc. Ordered journals can help this at the cost of speed at various levels. Jan -- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

primm

15:21

On Friday 17 August 2007 15:53, Clayton wrote:

...

...
...
I upgraded some lan clients to 10.2. I notice that new installs use ext3. Is the latter better? Faster? Is there a problem with reiser?

http://lwn.net/Articles/202780/ Summary: It does not scale. For uniprocessor, it should not make much difference. But reiser3 horribly bogs down on multi-core servers, for example during kernel compiles after a tarball was extracted (which is what happens with `rpmbuild kernel-default.spec`.)

fwiw and this is just an uneducated observation, ext3 thrashes the disk a lot more than reiser. You can hear it. On two identical scsi PII 450 clients the reiser is up before the ext3 everytime. That's why I'm not sure about nfs over multiple file systems. Another poster said that was irrelevant. I'm not so sure. When I say up I mean the time it takes to pressing the on button on the client and having a nis powered kdm login screen. Un saludo, Lynn. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Jan Engelhardt

15:35

On Aug 17 2007 17:21, primm wrote:

...

fwiw and this is just an uneducated observation, ext3 thrashes the disk a lot more than reiser. You can hear it. On two identical scsi PII 450 clients the reiser is up before the ext3 everytime. That's why I'm not sure about nfs over multiple file systems. Another poster said that was irrelevant. I'm not so sure. When I say up I mean the time it takes to pressing the on button on the client and having a nis powered kdm login screen.

what I mean is that NFS does not care what filesystem you use. It will work anyway. Jan -- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Primm

19:22

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what I mean is that NFS does not care what filesystem you use. It will work anyway.

nfs works fine no matter what you throw at it. I'll need to revert to an example. On ext3 an Openoffice document takes 45 seconds to load. On the reiser box it's there in 15. Same server, identical clients, different filesystem. server suse 7.3 ext2 client 1 PII 450 384 suse 10.2 8G scsi reiser client 2 PII 450 384 suse 10.2 8G scsi ext3 Cheers, Lynn -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

jdd

16:02

primm wrote:

...

more than reiser.

anyway, reiserfs 3 is not maintained anymore (or nearly) and reiserfs 4 not ready for day to day use, so reiserfs is no more an option for new computers (for old working ones, no worries) jdd -- http://www.dodin.net http://gourmandises.orangeblog.fr/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Michel Salim

18 Aug 18 Aug

10:05

On 17/08/07, jdd wrote:

...

primm wrote:

...
more than reiser.

anyway, reiserfs 3 is not maintained anymore (or nearly) and reiserfs 4 not ready for day to day use, so reiserfs is no more an option for new computers (for old working ones, no worries)

I guess running Reiser on a computer with an old version of Linux is safe, but then you don't benefit from any bug-fixing done to more recent kernels. While running Reiser with a new kernel exposes you to the potential problems due to reduced testing. -- Michel -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

joe

18:07

Michel Salim wrote:

...

On 17/08/07, jdd wrote:

...
primm wrote:

...
more than reiser. anyway, reiserfs 3 is not maintained anymore (or nearly) and reiserfs 4 not ready for day to day use, so reiserfs is no more an option for new computers (for old working ones, no worries)

I guess running Reiser on a computer with an old version of Linux is safe, but then you don't benefit from any bug-fixing done to more recent kernels. While running Reiser with a new kernel exposes you to the potential problems due to reduced testing.

Hmm, something fishy I think, about all this talk of reiserfs being unmaintained and dangerous. Think about it for a moment: reiserfs is *still* the default filesystem in Suse Linux Enterprise Server SP1. IMHO if reiserfs is good enough for the data center, it's probably good enough for just about anything you might want to use it for. Joe -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

John Andersen

18:47

On Saturday 18 August 2007, Michel Salim wrote:

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I guess running Reiser on a computer with an old version of Linux is safe, but then you don't benefit from any bug-fixing done to more recent kernels.

What does bug fixing in the kernel have to do with Reiserfs? There are a lot of things that haven't had bug fixes in YEARS, simply because they have been debugged to the extend humanly possible and are not in need of fixing. Reiser 3 is far from bug free, but its still very solid for single processor systems even with the newest kernel. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Carlos E. R.

21 Aug 21 Aug

19:15

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Friday 2007-08-17 at 18:02 +0200, jdd wrote:

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primm wrote:

...
more than reiser.

anyway, reiserfs 3 is not maintained anymore (or nearly) and reiserfs 4 not ready for day to day use, so reiserfs is no more an option for new computers (for old working ones, no worries)

That's not exactly true, either. It is 'just' maintained, but not improved. It is as good an option as it was. The rest of the filesystems should get better and overpass reiserfs 3. If you have a machine where you hit it's bottleneck, then you have an issue; otherwise, it is a very good filesystem. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFGyznytTMYHG2NR9URAv6wAJ9CN6FHmJbDvZK6DFI2hFNxm8gH7QCfdrNW ODMNXXjFRushG24FLZawVMY= =DXOt -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

James Knott

17 Aug 17 Aug

19:20

primm wrote:

...

On Friday 17 August 2007 15:53, Clayton wrote:

...
...
...
I upgraded some lan clients to 10.2. I notice that new installs use ext3. Is the latter better? Faster? Is there a problem with reiser?

http://lwn.net/Articles/202780/ Summary: It does not scale. For uniprocessor, it should not make much difference. But reiser3 horribly bogs down on multi-core servers, for example during kernel compiles after a tarball was extracted (which is what happens with `rpmbuild kernel-default.spec`.)

fwiw and this is just an uneducated observation, ext3 thrashes the disk a lot more than reiser. You can hear it. On two identical scsi PII 450 clients the reiser is up before the ext3 everytime. That's why I'm not sure about nfs over multiple file systems. Another poster said that was irrelevant. I'm not so sure. When I say up I mean the time it takes to pressing the on button on the client and having a nis powered kdm login screen.

Un saludo, Lynn.

What I said, was that NFS doesn't care what the file system is. However, different file systems may affect performance for everything that accesses it, not just NFS. -- Use OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Andreas Jaeger

19 Aug 19 Aug

13:39

Clayton writes:

...

...
...
I upgraded some lan clients to 10.2. I notice that new installs use ext3. Is the latter better? Faster? Is there a problem with reiser?

http://lwn.net/Articles/202780/ Summary: It does not scale. For uniprocessor, it should not make much difference. But reiser3 horribly bogs down on multi-core servers, for example during kernel compiles after a tarball was extracted (which is what happens with `rpmbuild kernel-default.spec`.)

I am one of goofs who is hanging onto Reiser v3.... my excuse is that it seems to survive reboots (intentional or otherwise) a lot more elegantly than ext. That is a bit of a lame excuse I know...

In that case continue to use ReiserFS v3 - we just changed the *default*. We still test and fix it, so feel free to use it on your system if you prefer it, Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Director Platform/openSUSE, aj@suse.de SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126

James Knott

17 Aug 17 Aug

14:07

primm wrote:

...

I upgraded some lan clients to 10.2. I notice that new installs use ext3. Is the latter better? Faster? Is there a problem with reiser? Why did suse change it? My nfs server is cli 7.2 with ext2. Is it wise to export nfs between differing filesystems? Or can I assume that if it isn't broke then don't fix it?

Cheers, Steve.

While I don't know of a technical reason for not defaulting to Reiser, as I understand it the decision was made due to lack of on going support for Reiser. As far as access over the network is concerned, file system type is irrelevant. -- Use OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

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participants (11)

Andreas Jaeger
Carlos E. R.
Clayton
James Knott
Jan Engelhardt
jdd
joe
John Andersen
Michel Salim
Primm
primm