On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, Daniel Hammer wrote:
>is there any reason why Reiser FS is not supported by
>Pinstripe?
Reiserfs is an experimental patch to the kernel. It plays with
stuff in the kernel that is considered non-kosher by Linus et al.
Mainly because the kernel doesn't have a journalling framework
yet, so reiserfs has its own, and I believe does its own caching
as well. Also, the documentation sucks bigtime (read doesn't
exist) - although it is a breeze to install and set up, and works
quite well.
>I understand that "officially" it did not enter the
>kernel but there are patches by "Mandrake" and "SuSE"
>and I have never heard of any instability problems
>with Reiser FS and Linux.
I'm using reiserfs myself right now, and not having problems,
however I'm on the reiserfs mailing list and there are people
having problems. From a support perspective, including a large
patch like reiserfs that is non-standard and might not ever get
included in the official kernel could possibly create a support
nightmare IMHO. You see, once it is included, it is something
that will have to be permanently supported more or less, and the
future of it is unknown. Reiserfs's journalling code is going to
have to be rewritten into a generic framework in 2.5 if it is to
be included in the official kernel from what I understand. On
top of that, the reiserfs developers have been known to 'not play
well with others' on the linux-kernel mailing list from time to
time, so it would be kindof risky I believe including it in the
official kernel. It is NOT hard to add the patch on at all
though, so it is still very useful.
I myself am thinking of switching to ext3 now though as I have
heard that it is quite stable now, and has a much higher
likelyhood of being included soon in the official kernel due to
being backward compatible with ext2. In other words, you can
umount it as ext3, and then mount it as ext2.
>One could offer both, one kernel "official" and one with
>an appropriate patch for ReiserFS.
Sure, anyone is free to do that. For a distribution maker though
it is just yet another kernel permutation to have to support, and
the more permutations of the kernel that are available by
default, the more problems that have to be dealt with.
As a FS, I like Reiserfs so far, but from a support and
integration standpoint, I think ext3 will be adopted sooner and
faster due to its compatibility with ext2, and cleaner
integration with the kernel. If you read linux-kernel at all,
this seems the way things will likely happen.
I have recently heard that ext3 is very useable now, despite not
getting a lot of media attention, and so I'm going to try it out
soon and possibly switch from reiserfs to ext3. If I do, I'll
definitely announce my results for comparison..
TTYL
--
Mike A. Harris - Person who hates snow, and might not see it anymore. ;o)
Linux advocate, Open source advocate | Copyright 2000 all rights reserved
======================================================================
[Mike A. Harris Linux tip #1 - 50 line mode]
Is the 80x25 line screen too small for you? If you want more screen real
estate, you can set 50 column mode by editing your /etc/lilo.conf file, and
adding a new line with "vga=ext" to the global section near the top. Save
and exit, then run "lilo". Next time you boot, you'll have a nice big 80x50
screen.
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