On Thursday 30 August 2001 12:35 pm, Martin, Guillen wrote:

Can somebody tell me when need I to think hard about using reiserfs? By now I'm happy whit ext2. Thaks, Martin.

There's nothing wrong with ext2 at all. It's stable and reliable. The advantage of Reiserfs (or any other journaling filesystem) is that your filesystem metadata (directories, permissions, inode maps, and so forth) is protected if a crash occurs during a disk write. Journaled filesystems make a prelog image of anything they are about to change on the disk, then make the change, then remove the prelog image (this is a generic description of the proces, though it varies depending on which journaling fs you're using). If a crash happens during any stage of this, the journaled filesystem detects during the reboot that things are out of sync, and either rolls forward or rolls backward the journal. The nice thing is that this is guaranteed by design to be a complete move, one way or the other -- you either get the changes or you lose the changes, but you never, ever, get half the changes and thereby have a corrupted disk or file. A side benefit of this is that the journaled filesystems can verify disk integrity after an abrupt shutdown by scanning the journal itself, rather than the whole drive structure. This means that the fsck process is reduced from several minutes (I've seen it take 20 minutes on a large drive) to just a couple of seconds. Reiserfs also provides some disk access performance improvements over ext2. The extent of the improvement depends on what size of files you have, and on your typical usage patterns. In my personal experience the improvement is "noticeable" but not "dramatic." Regards, Scott -- ------------------------------------------------------------ "I don't mind Microsoft making money. I mind them having a bad operating system." -- Linus Torvalds, in the NY Times Scott Courtney http://www.4th.com/