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On Tuesday 14 May 2002 10:07 am, Alexander Gretencord wrote: |
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> Well, many people have run it without problems. SuSE even ships it with |
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> their distribution since ages (before it got into the main kernel tree). |
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> Without an explanation _why_ you think it's not stable enough the statement |
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> is worth nothing. So ACK, this definately needs an entry. |
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First, an appeal to authority (Suse in this case) is a logical fallacy you |
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should not engage in. Just because Suse ships reiser with their distribution |
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doesn't make it stable or safe for production use. |
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In fact, a friend of mine who runs a computer consultancy, and uses Suse in |
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nearly all of his installations, was bitten very badly by a reiserfs bug that |
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resulted in near-catastrophic data loss. I say near, because he was able to |
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recover from backup tapes. Nevertheless it resulted in an allnighter getting |
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the system back up, on a more reliable ext2 filesystem, followed by several |
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days work as he moved other installations off of reiser and onto ext2 (his |
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choice, not mine ... I probably would have opted for JFS or ext3 in his |
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particular case). |
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I have personally witnessed data loss using reiser on numerous occasions ... |
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symptoms ranged from strange "undeletable" files that were corrupt, to entire |
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directory trees vanishing for no apparent reason (but the disk usage |
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remaining unchanged). No recovery was possible in either case (short of |
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reconstructing a new filesystem from scratch and restoring from backups). |
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In all these cases all of us had all been using reiserfs "for months with no |
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problems" ... and we still suffered severe data loss. |
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Reiserfs is NOT ready for production use, and the gentoo FAQ is both wise and |
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friendly for pointing that out and guiding people away from that particular |
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folly. |
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There are plenty of other, much safer filesystems to use, including XFS (if |
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you don't need bleeding edge experimental features, e.g. can be happy with |
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stock 2.4.18 kernel + xfs patches), JFS, ext3, ext2 (no journalling), and so |
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forth. I know people tend to get very emotionally attached to whatever |
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filesystem they like, but this IMHO is unwise ... one should be very agnostic |
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about what fs one chooses to use, rather than defending a particular choice |
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"to the death" as seems so common with software these days. |
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That having been said, there is a plethora of hard evidence as well as |
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anectdotal experiences to learn from, and to indicate that reiser really |
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isn't a safe choice to be making. This is reflected in the gentoo |
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installation documentation, IMHO exactly as it should be. |
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|
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Jean. |