Re: [gentoo-user] Good file system that recovers from a power failure.

[Alan McKinnon]

Apparently, though unproven, at 23:22 on Friday 31 December 2010, Dale did 
opine thusly:

> Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > Apparently, though unproven, at 22:12 on Friday 31 December 2010, Dale
> > did
> >
> > opine thusly:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I'm planning to build a rig like mine for my brother before to long.  I
> >> know there are lots of opinions on the net but want some personal
> >> experience information on this.  My brother does not have a UPS.  I may
> >> can talk him into getting one but not sure.  What is a good file system
> >> that recovers well from a improper shutdown?  I use ext2, ext3 and
> >> reiserfs here but never had a power problem, except when hal broke my
> >> stuff.  I know XFS is not good for this already from my own personal
> >> experience.
> >>
> >> Does anyone here have any personal experience on this?  Just a 'I use
> >> this and had a power failure and it powered up fine with no data loss'
> >> would be nice.   If this happened a lot and still worked, that would be
> >> even better.
> >>
> >> I'm not looking to start a turf war.  This will be a plain old desktop
> >> so it doesn't need a fancy file system, just one that recovers from a
> >> power failure.
> >
> > Down here we have Africa power.
> > Africa power makes post-Katrina power look tame.
> >
> > Total corruptions in 5 years with reiserfs-3.6 and NO ups in that
> > environment = zero.
> >
> > I can't fairly comment on ext[234] as I don't have the same length of
> > experience with them. From what other commentators have said elsewhere it
> > looks like with optimum settings and tweaks they can be just as good as I
> > got from reiser, but that's just hearsay from me.
> >
> > My gut feel on this is that any modern fs will be built to be able to
> > tolerate blackouts - it's almost a requirement these days. So it's
> > likely a 6 and half- dozen question in reality. Except XFS as you know,
> > but that's a special case (aggressive caching virtually requires a UPS
> > or guaranteed no-downtime power)
>
> I have /boot on ext2.  Portage is on ext3.  I have reiserfs on
> everything else.  I did have the hal problem and a power supply fan that
> died and I had to pull the plug.  All the file systems I use recovered
> nicely after those problems.  I didn't lose anything that I know of.
>
> Is reiserfs being maintained anymore?  I have read where some say it is
> not but I have also read they are working on version 4 and it is being
> maintained.  Not sure what to believe on this one.

When was the last time portage offered you a reiser update?

The reiser4progs ebuild has 13 Changelog entries in 2.5 years, 8 of them are 
stabilisation toe various arches. Current version is 1.0.7 and has been there 
for 23 months.

reiserfsprogs is similar, on 3.6.21 for 23 months and one update (not a 
stabilisation) since Aug 2007

reiser4 is not in the mainline kernel, and highly unlikely to ever be there 
according to the last thing I heard Linus say on the matter. Yes, it's in Zen 
IIRC, but Zen is not mainline. And reiser4 will probably never have a real 
fsck either (technical restriction - it's plugins that do the work and fsck 
cannot know what the plugins did)

Hans *was* reiserfs for all practical purposes. SuSE funded most of Reiserfs 
in the early days and they have switched away from it for logistic reasons.

Does any of that sound to you like "actively maintained"?

It's my opinion that reiser is in security-fix-only mode from whoever is 
maintaining it. If everything else around it stays the same, the fs will 
obviously continue working just as it always did. But the surrounding system 
is not stable, it changes rapidly, especially in kernel space, so the odds are 
stacked against reiser for bitrot. For all these reasons, I regretfully 
switched my own systems over to ext4 some time ago. Rieser was a good fs whose 
time has come and gone and I no longer had warm and fuzzies about the future 
with it.




-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com