Reiserfs

[Michael Butash]

I ran reiserfs for _everything_ I did up to about 2yr ago switching to 
ext4 once Reiser was sentenced and likely never going to write code 
again.  In that time I never once had fs corruption occur to lose data, 
and only don't think once I had to repair a file system with reiser. 
Performance was lacking as others were still evolving where it had 
stopped, so I moved on begrudgingly.

That was in days that laptop bios was dubious contributors to unclean 
shutdowns/suspends and other ugliness, so I was quite impressed with it.

Flip side, ext4 has been caused me more corruption than I care to admit 
or know, having to a few times single-user a box to manually fsck it.  I 
get lots of dubious oddities I attribute to the fs, but could also be 
the (crappy) ssd's, as that was about the time I switched to using them 
too.  I layer encryption, lvm, and raid enough that I lose trim ability, 
so not sure how much that factors into it.  All in all I consider going 
back to reiser occasionally in frustration...

Side note, I saw just yesterday development is actually still ongoing 
with reiser4, as his work is being carried on by another 
contributor/employee of reiser's old company making progress.  I 
somewhat plan on going btrfs to lose the lvm/raid layering done with 
lvm2 and md today (and get trim/protest ext4 pissing me off), but if not 
that, I might try reiser4 at some point for grins.  Any one else brave 
enough to run it on a machine they use yet?

-mb


On 10/18/2012 09:00 AM, Matt Graham wrote:
> From: Derek Trotter
>> I noticed when I installed the latest kubuntu a couple of weeks ago
>> that reiserfs was one of the options to use for formatting the
>> partition.   Does it have some advantage over newer filesystems? Or
>> is it there because it's been around for several years?
>
> There are theoretical advantages to using reiserfs if you've got a huge number
> of small files.  I didn't notice any difference in performance between
> reiserfs and ext3 when I had partitions of both types on the same system,
> though.  Reports from the trenches say that if you've got filesystem
> corruption, then reiserfsck has a greater chance of totally hosing everything
> than e2fsck does.  The one time I had to use reiserfsck, it recovered
> everything, but that's just me.
>