Is it time to remove reiserfs? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#121

Post by ak217 » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 4:26 PM UTC

tomjakubowski wrote: post #107

pnutjam wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you really need to have a reason to use ext3/4. I stick to xfs for daily stuff and btrfs if I want any sort of extra functionality. It's super stable in basic configs. For example, I have a /data drive formated xfs, then I mount a /backup formated btrfs, rsync the 2, take a btrfs snapshot, and unmount /backup.

what makes xfs better than ext4 as a general purpose filesystem?

xfs dynamically allocates inode storage space. A very typical failure scenario of ext4 is to run out of inode quota while there are plenty of free blocks available. This scenario is not possible with xfs. This alone makes it more dependable than ext4 in practice.

There used to be major performance variances where xfs was better in certain workloads and ext4 in others, but those appear to have been smoothed out and now their performance seems very similar across all workloads.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#122

Post by leephillips » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 4:28 PM UTC

fest wrote: post #54

What other filesystems have checksums for data? Last time I looked, after a silent SSD failure that I only noticed because some .so files were affected, the only options were btrfs and reiserfs (I think ZFS required a custom kernel at that time). The incident was really eye-opening in how fragile was my data: if .so files were not affected, I would have continued to use the system and erroneous data would silently be…

Git? Since I put pretty much everything into Git, it’s like another filesystem overlayed on my normal filesystem.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#123

Post by EvanAnderson » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 4:31 PM UTC

andix wrote: post #26

DocTomoe wrote: post #22

ReiserFS is a lesson in project naming. When I started in Linux full-time, back in the early 2000s, I was presented with different fs options - the installer did not give me any information on benefits, or on which ones were considered "stable". ext2 was available, but it also had a built-in version number, and I feared that once ext3 eventually rolled over, it might be incompatible. So I chose the fs that came with…

That’s why it’s best to only name things after dead people. Less surprises.

An Intel employee explained their code-naming on white-box server chassis/motherboard combinations back in the late 90s. There were chassis named things like "Balboa" and "Cabrillo". Motherboards were named things like "Buckeye", "Redwood", and "Sitka". He said "We've never been sued by a dead explorer or a tree."

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#124

Post by zokier » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 4:31 PM UTC

fest wrote: post #54

What other filesystems have checksums for data? Last time I looked, after a silent SSD failure that I only noticed because some .so files were affected, the only options were btrfs and reiserfs (I think ZFS required a custom kernel at that time). The incident was really eye-opening in how fragile was my data: if .so files were not affected, I would have continued to use the system and erroneous data would silently be…

dm-verity and or dm-integrity

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/device-ma...

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#125

Post by aidenn0 » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 4:32 PM UTC

cestith wrote: post #62

pmarreck wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear, hear on replacing reiserfs with bcachefs. Kent Overstreet could use the support, the project looks good, and to my knowledge he is not a murderer.

The salacious details are always part of this discussion and outside of a very carefully scoped conversation like was requested on the list I think that's always going to happen. On just a technical basis, though, I think bcachefs pays a lot of attention to many of the same issues ReiserFS does, gets more current maintenance, and is maintained more along the lines of kernel interfaces other filesystems use. That last…

Hans' personality got in the way of technical work in more than one way; Reiser4 never got upstreamed partly (if not mostly) because he had too big of a chip on his shoulder to make the changes requested from upstream.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#126

Post by linsomniac » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 4:32 PM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #10

ReiserFS does have its benefits in highly specific use-cases. I have a filesystem with an absurd number of tiny files in it. I host a statically rendered wikipedia mirror. Tens of millions of gzipped html-files with a filesize in the range 1-5 Kb. ReiserFS is the only filesystem I know that deals even the slightest bit gracefully with this thanks to tail-packing.

Years ago this was very similar to our use case, only much smaller file sizes, and Reiser saved an amazing amount of overhead.

The systems were hosting map tiles of the entire Earth, and a lot of them were solid blue (ocean) or solid beige (unoccupied land). Those files were something like 60-300 bytes, going from memory. Reiser was basically the only FS that would handle that reasonably.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#127

Post by TOGoS » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 4:32 PM UTC

cestith wrote: post #29

Personally I've always really liked ReiserFS. The collected storage of small files, the storage of the tails of files, the balanced tree structure, and the fast journaling gave better performance in reads, writes, boot time, and storage efficiency than most file systems. The focus on small files, which were and arguably still are most files on a typical system, was a big key to this. It made it ideal for storing thin…

I'm no big company, but I've been using btrfs on my Raspberry Pi file server and its disk has been sitting there spinning for something like 8 years with no issues yet. I keep hearing that "btrfs isn't production-ready" but I wouldn't know it from experience.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#128

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 4:35 PM UTC

codazoda wrote: post #28

> NB: Please don't discuss the personalities involved. Ah, but that's all I can think about when I read about reiserfs. For anyone who is unaware, the author, Hans Reiser, killed his wife and hid her body. There was a long and public investigation and he was found guilty. He later produced her body as part of a plea deal.

[deleted]

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#129

Post by formerly_proven » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 4:36 PM UTC

cout wrote: post #108

actionfromafar wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the meta-data is somehow distributed and fsck can pick up pieces of it. I don't think you have to encrypt the image to avoid the edge case, a compress of the image should be enough. It still sucks though.

How do other filesystems avoid this? It seems like a hard problem in general.

Many other filesystems have one or more arrays for metadata. Sometimes these are formatted like files themselves. So a tool to recover it only has to guess at those contiguous arrays, instead of considering essentially any block metadata.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#130

Post by Syonyk » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 4:36 PM UTC

sterwill wrote: post #61

Syonyk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great for small files, but it's also got some really nasty little corner cases. You do not store ReiserFS filesystem images on ReiserFS filesystems without encryption, or the next time you run fsck, you'll end up with the two filesystems oddly merged into something entirely useless. I'm not sure if that's been fixed, I got a bit tired of the exotica for general daily driver systems, and ext3/ext4 cover my needs…

That's one heck of an edge case! How does fsck manage to completely confuse filesystem metadata and data like this? Surely this is only if there's corruption in the (outer) filesystem, right?

> That's one heck of an edge case!

Yeah... especially if you tend to back up systems when you're rebuilding or replacing them by just backing up the whole disk. It's got everything, you can mount it as a loop device (which you can't do with a compressed image as someone else mentions), etc. I've got a lot of random filesystem images around, and once I trashed a fs entirely with Reiser images on Reiser, I was done with it.