Gentoo Archives: gentoo-amd64

From: Jared Lindsay <cinder.sub@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-amd64@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-amd64] reiser4 fs
Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2005 19:29:00
Message-Id: e16d914c0512261127j5b29665ek72671bac881625f5@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-amd64] reiser4 fs by Andrea Chiavelli
1 On 12/26/05, Andrea Chiavelli <andrea-chiavelli@×××××××.it> wrote:
2 > Hi guys.
3 > I'm going to install gentoo 2005.1-r1 for amd64 on a turion-powered
4 > notebook and an awful dilemma caught me: should i use reiser4 for root
5 > partition or not? I've read tons of docs available on the topic but i
6 > found it a bit contradictory. Do you know anything about the actual
7 > state of support of the reiser4 fs? Does the default gentoo-kernel
8 > support it ? have you experienced reiser4 on a amd64? Is it really so
9 > fast or current software make it buggy and useless?
10
11 Some people (notably Duncan) have said it much better than I will, but
12 here's my 2 cents. I have run an almost pure reiser4 system since
13 July (/, /home/, /usr/portage are all reiser4; I only have one small
14 ext3 and a large xfs), and nothing has gone wrong. If you decide to
15 install using reiser4, and not have to do a filesystem change (backing
16 up all your files in the process), you need to find a LiveCD that will
17 support it for you, such as Lxnay's or Ahorn's. You can patch
18 gentoo-sources (there is a good post on the Unsupported Software
19 forum), or use another kernel.
20
21 (Incidentally, is ck still included in the portage tree? I thought
22 that had reiser4 support.)
23
24 My only gripe with reiser4 is how it handles user extended attributes.
25 Put simply, it does it completely different than other filesystems,
26 and as such, those programs that take advantage of it (in my case,
27 beagle), don't fully support reiser4. In beagle's case, the file
28 index isn't updated as fast as, say, on ext3. Hopefully Reiser will
29 give in and use the normal user_xattr, though I am not very
30 optimistic.
31
32 --
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