2.4.x kernel and reiserfs

[Kurt Granroth]

Kevin Buettner wrote:
> I understand that there are NFS problems with ReiserFS, though I
> don't know what these are.  I wish these would get resolved though
> so I could switch more of my paritions over to using ReiserFS.

Indeed.  There are also problems with reiserfs and some applications
like vmware and qmail (there are workarounds on reiserfs.org, though).

I've used reiserfs on several machines for a few months now (since
SuSE 7.0).  For the most part, it's worked great (with the
workarounds).  I never did get around to applying the NFS patch,
though.  The result is that while you can mount and nominally use a
reiserfs filesystem over NFS, it doesn't always act like you expect.
For instance, if you delete files on the client side, they sometimes
aren't deleted on the server AND will sometimes leave a file that
can't be deleted at all.  Also, 'cvs' doesn't like working on that
combination at *all*.

But I was willing to put up with all that for awhile.. until just a
few days ago.  Thursday night, I had a system crash and when I
rebooted, I found that I had a corrupted filesystem.  The reiserfsck
utility just made things worse and for awhile, I thought I had lost
everything.  After a LOT of help by Chris Mason, though, I was able to
recover most of my data.. but that was the last straw for me.  I can
handle the NFS and vmware stuff but I can't stomach random
corruptions.  The reiserfs mailing list also has scores of problem
reports of corrupted filesystems.  According to Hans, those problems
should be fixed with the current development code (which I *did* use
to recover my data and which did work).  So I'm going to wait until
this code is in 2.4 and has been tested for a few months before going
back.
-- 
Kurt Granroth            | http://www.granroth.org
KDE Developer/Evangelist | SuSE Labs Open Source Developer
granroth@kde.org         | granroth@suse.com
            KDE -- Conquer Your Desktop