# What's the status on Reiser4? And any kernel suggestions?

## Master One

I was just searching the forum, but it gave no clear results.

Some people tell, that they are using Reiser4 for a long time now without any problems, other report problems right from the beginning.

I know, it's not marked to be stable for use under Linux yet, but nevertheless lot's of people are already using it.

I am on the way buying a new IBM ThinkPad T42p to be used with Gentoo Linux only, and I indeed was thinking about installing Reiser4 on it (on all partitions, except /boot). That should give it a real speed boost with the embedded 60 GB 7200 RPM harddrive.

Anyone else uses Reiser4 on a notebook?

And then I would like to see some kernel suggestions. There are so many patchsets out there nowadays, it's hard to follow, which have the reiser4 patch included, and which not. Or is it maybe the best, to just use plain vanilla sources (development-sources) and only apply the single reiser4 patch?

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## Wedge_

I've been using it on a small (3G) partition for well over a year now to store my portage tree, and I haven't had any trouble from it in a long time. I still don't quite trust it enough to use it for anything more important though  :Smile: 

 *Master One wrote:*   

> And then I would like to see some kernel suggestions. There are so many patchsets out there nowadays, it's hard to follow, which have the reiser4 patch included, and which not. Or is it maybe the best, to just use plain vanilla sources (development-sources) and only apply the single reiser4 patch?

 

Patching a vanilla kernel will work fine. Then you have the others like mm-sources, the cko patchset, and all the various user produced kernels on the forums here which tend to include it.

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## rmh3093

hey I have been using reiser4 for a few months now, the only problem I had was my own fault, not reiser4.... this probably would have happened one ext3 also..... but I restarted my computer durring boot a bunch of times because the LCD wasnt turning on (i forgot I had an external monitor hooked up and not turned on) so rebooting the computer a bunch of time wrong corrupted the root fs, but other than that no problems for me

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## solar

it is in my understanding that Gentoo is not and has no plans to support r4. As a user you are on your own with this file system.

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## lude

 *Master One wrote:*   

> I am on the way buying a new IBM ThinkPad T42p to be used with Gentoo Linux only, and I indeed was thinking about installing Reiser4 on it (on all partitions, except /boot). That should give it a real speed boost with the embedded 60 GB 7200 RPM harddrive.
> 
> Anyone else uses Reiser4 on a notebook?

 

Running it here on an Inspiron 8200 for about 3 months, been very solid. 

-d

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## feld

all partition except boot here. been running it for about a month with no problems. never even faced the lockup when compiling Openoffice or Ximian-OpenOffice. I tried 3 times. It's passed my standards, anyway.  :Very Happy: 

-Feld

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## fallow

my subjective point of view :

benefits of using reiser4 are less than cost of use it at the moment.

Of course is easy to patch kernel for reiser4 ( namesys snapshot , mm broken out etc. ) , also is many of ready to use patchsets on this forum provides reiser4 but is not prior thing imho.

reiser4 is not any Space Travel form  :Wink:   or Ferrari or F1 bolid  :Smile: 

is quite faster with _SOME_ operations than reiser3.

CPU usage is worst (higher) than in reiser3, parraler operations are  faster for example ( a lot of tests is based only on single operations not parraler ) . Reiser4 implementations changes many of things in kernel and it is radically , speed is provides with less interactivity cost for ex.

I testing reiser4 since 0.5.x snpashot .  I have whole system on it.

speed increse is small , cpu usage is high ..I think about definitive return to the reiser3 . logically is less " + " than " - " of using r4 at the moment . Maybe when it will be in vanilla will be much good than now.

Gentoo not support point of reiser4 is clearly understand imho.

cheers.

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## Master One

That kind of feedback is very good until now!

 *solar wrote:*   

> it is in my understanding that Gentoo is not and has no plans to support r4. As a user you are on your own with this file system.

 

Gentoo is already supporting Reiser4, since the Reiser4-tools are in portage. It also has nothing to do with explicitely supporting it, because as soon as it gets into one of the kernels, which are in portage (probably mm-sources at first), it simply will be there...

I am really thinking of using Reiser4 on my notebooks, since it's fast and at least "pretty" relieable. Nevertheless more feedback on the ups and downs are highly welcome. Also I am still unsure, which kernel to use without having to fiddle arround too much, otherwise I'll end up just using development-sources and applying the reiser4 patch manually.

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## fallow

now patching kernel reiser4 is easy , is many ways , imho build own kernel  :Smile: 

official livecd don`t support reiser4 , gentoo-dev-sources also don`t support reiser4 . mm-sources is not gentoo-sources , is maintaining by Andrew Morton , not gentoo team  :Razz:   :Smile:  :Smile: 

cheers.

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## Master One

After a lot of reading on this subject, I came to the conclusion, not to use Reiser4. I need this installation on my new IBM ThinkPad T42p to be rock solid for daily work, and if I start playing arround with too much ~x86 stuff, I'm just gonna play arround all the time patching and upgrading, I know myself. So I'll go for ext3 on /boot and reiserfs on all the rest. I'll stick to a "x86" system, keeping the "~x86" to a minimum, but I am definitely gonna try that very interesting installation method "Stage 1 on a Stage3 tarball"  :Cool:  Anyway, thank's for the feedback on that topic, guys.

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## thubble

Reiser4 gave an ENORMOUS (like 2-3x) speedup on "emerge sync". It definitely uses more CPU, but on my P4/2.8Ghz it's not really noticeable. One unfortunate problem is that apps seem to take forever to launch, even really tiny apps. For instance, typing "su" on the command line and entering my password can take about 5 seconds to bring up a root shell. Typing "emerge -vp packagename" takes about 10 seconds from pushing "Enter" to seeing the "Calculating dependencies..." message. This is on a just-rebooted machine, with nothing running. Processes are in the "D" state (awaiting I/O, I believe) during this time.

I suspect this may be because I'm using the Staircase scheduler, which I've heard has problems with Reiser4. I'd like to try another scheduler but I can't find an appropriate kernel (there's mm-sources, but it doesn't support nvidia). Also I'm using cfq, and I've heard that deadline or anticipatory is often better.

Another strange problem with Reiser4 is that it breaks some apps. For instance, acroread can't load fonts if it's on an R4 partition, and Wine refuses to run at all. I have to keep an extra Reiser3 partition to run these apps from.

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## ninjabadger

I too noticed the slow su root on a freshly booted system and have reverted to reiser3, i can not notice much difference.

I think ill stick with it untill there are no problems on reiser4

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## chemical chris

im using Rieserfs4 for everything except boot on this system with NO faults - and infact - a lot more fault tolerence then i had previously experienced with EXT-3 - espically with concerns to ungrashous rebooting.

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## predatorfreak

 *Master One wrote:*   

> That kind of feedback is very good until now!
> 
>  *solar wrote:*   it is in my understanding that Gentoo is not and has no plans to support r4. As a user you are on your own with this file system. 
> 
> Gentoo is already supporting Reiser4, since the Reiser4-tools are in portage. It also has nothing to do with explicitely supporting it, because as soon as it gets into one of the kernels, which are in portage (probably mm-sources at first), it simply will be there...
> ...

 

I believe he ment that they don't plan on adding reiser4 in its current state (as in, they won't include it in gentoo-dev-sources/gentoo-sources), Correct me if I'm wrong solar.

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## freelight

I've been having good luck with my two all-reiser4 systems (on nitro-sources). It definitely uses more CPU power, but the harddrive access speedup is significant. I must admit that I haven't run any benchmarks myself, but I like it, and recommend it for desktop use.

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## Master One

It gave me no peace, so I was again reading on this topic since yesterday.

As I understand, the reiser4 patch is not enough, there are some addition small patches that are added to the larger patchsets I've seen, and it also must be taken care to use the proper i/o scheduler (or was it cpu scheduler?).

Can anyone give me a recommendation on a "stable" patchset that incorporates reiser4 + vesa-ng + swsusp2, that had the proper default scheduler(s), and preferably for which there is an ebuild available?

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## garlicbread

I'm planning on using reiser4 on my laptop (P4) when I get around to rebuilding it

but I won't be able to use it for my Desktop system yet (AMD64)

word of warning for anyone using a AMD64 system, there appears to a specific bug at the moment that's not been fixed with reiser 4

I think this is due to namesys not having a AMD64 machine to play around with, but I've heard that this may be changing soon

(from looking at the reiser dev mailing lists)

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## Jake

 *garlicbread wrote:*   

> I'm planning on using reiser4 on my laptop (P4) when I get around to rebuilding it
> 
> but I won't be able to use it for my Desktop system yet (AMD64)
> 
> word of warning for anyone using a AMD64 system, there appears to a specific bug at the moment that's not been fixed with reiser 4
> ...

 

They have an AMD64 machine and fixed a major bug.

As far as I know, I'm the only person who's been able to crash reiser4 on AMD64 since the recent bugfix, but my hardware might be a little flaky.

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## garlicbread

Yep your right, they've recently fixed the reiser4_find_next_zero_bit bug

that's cool  :Very Happy: 

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## fallow

 *garlicbread wrote:*   

> Yep your right, they've recently fixed the reiser4_find_next_zero_bit bug
> 
> that's cool 

 

and this fix and 2 other CKO fixes will be in 2.6.11-rc4-vivid1 with NickScheduler (SMP/non-SMP) .

cheers.

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