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Is it time to remove reiserfs?

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Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#151

Post by porker »

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.

> 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.

Are there any newer file systems that cope with this use-case?

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#152

Post by blablabla123 »

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.

Yeah that's also why I stopped using it. Why didn't they just fork it and change the name? I don't get it.

FWIW at some point it also had quite severe stability issues. I'm sure those were solved but that might have contributed to the fact why there was no effort to fork it but instead people went with ZFS, XFS and eventually ext4

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#153

Post by j16sdiz »

api wrote: post #83
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The logical successor was supposed to be btrfs, but that project IMHO may never be ready for production use. https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Production_Users Facebook deployed it on millions of servers. Is that production enough? Synology NAS devices also use it.

Lots of people seem to turn up their nose at btrfs. Is there a reason for that? Was it perhaps launched before it was really ready and people still remember early versions?

In their earlier days, the ENOSPCE bug corrupts the filesystem.

If you do a heavy random write workload, it fills up the disk pretty quickly and require a re-balance _before_ ran out of space.

Of cause you can do nocow on those files, but than it lost all the checksuming/snapshotting features.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#154

Post by ajsnigrutin »

londons_explore wrote: post #142
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #116

I, for one, don't understand why can't they give Hans a computer and an internet connection and allow him to work on some open-source project.

There are interesting links to slavery and workhouses by allowing people to do actual labor from prison. There is pretty much no way to allow people to 'volunteer' to do this kind of work without giving someone an incentive to get as many people into prison and using it as a giant slave work camp.

Don't prisoners already work in prisons, atleast in US ones? (although my knowledge comes mostly from movies and new articles).

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#155

Post by marginalia_nu »

bajsejohannes wrote: post #115
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.

Trailing off topic, but what's the static wikipedia mirror? I contemplated making something like that some years ago when wikipedia was quite slow.

I've modified the HTML of the pages quite a lot as it's largely a design experiment.

https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/

The data is a bit stale right now, since there's a new dump available and I haven't converted it yet. But it's pretty easy to set up. Just grab a zim-file from here[1] and unpack with an appropriate library with an optional step of parsing and transforming the DOM then save into gzipped html files and set up a server for unpacking and serving those.

The conversion job takes a few days but it's not that bad.

[1] http://wikimedia.bytemark.co.uk/ (use a mirror if it doesn't work)

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#156

Post by marginalia_nu »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #112
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.

Just mount a romfs image of site data as loopback.

Why can't I just use a filesystem to store files in?

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#157

Post by kiririn »

pnutjam wrote: post #86
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…

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.

Lack of support for shrinking in XFS is one reason that regularly comes up for me

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#158

Post by lanstin »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #150
ComputerGuru wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook doesn’t use it’s servers the same way we use our computers. They image machines in and out of existence. They don’t have file systems going through power loss on a weekly basis. They don’t upgrade the kernel on existing installations. They don’t expand their storage after the fact. If their machines fail, they don’t care - they’re completely fungible.

OP said production use. Can you define production use then?

The thing of recreating VMs a lot instead of upgrading or keeping them a long time is production use. The whole point of VMs, aside from not taking 3 months to order and provision, is that you can put the "long-term maintenance of a disk and OS" cost to zero and just recreate from SoR (hopefully git) whenever something needs to change. If you are editing state on persistent VMs, you are missing some really nice features of VM based deployment. It's like containers but more well understood and possibly more cost efficient (depending on the code).

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#159

Post by nyanpasu64 »

pnutjam wrote: post #86
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…

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.

I once formatted an external drive with xfs, wanted to repurpose some of the space to be readable on Windows, found out you couldn't resize xfs, reformatted the drive as exfat (lol you can't resize that either), and lost my last copy of some past files.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#160

Post by acatton »

hutrdvnj wrote: post #134
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried btrfs? It has tail packing, block subdivision and inline files.

Is btrfs stable yet?

It's always been. I used it on my servers in "Raid 10" mode and on my daily driver for 3 years now.

As long as you don't do BTRFS-level raid 5/6. (Just do lvm-level or md-raid-level raid 5/6) don't do many subvolume with quota. (many subvolumes is fine) It's production ready.

I don't know where this "btrfs is not stable" coming from. According to HackerNews, I should have lost my data due to BTRFS 10 times already.

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