# how stable is reiser4?

## Chaos

I'm thinking about trying out reiser4 (the speed and features have sounded very promising for some time), but I'm a stickler for data integrity.  Obviously I'm aware that it's not marked as stable and I'd be testing it at my own risk, but I was wondering what the general response is to how stable it is (there's always a forum bias that something looks worse than it is because people rarely post to talk about how great something is and often post when something breaks).

Are people running it and finding that it runs fast and without problems?

How about just running without problems, but without a noticable speed improvement or, in fact, a speed decrease?

Anyone have major problems with it?

Thanks!

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## kimchi_sg

I once tried fresh installing with reiser4 using lxnay's liveCD, and was shocked to see that the hard disk drive access light barely blinked at all when doing "emerge system".   :Shocked:  My guess is that the drive gets accessed 10 times less in reiser4 than with reiserfs.

I have no idea why, maybe it is more memory-intensive and delivers good results for its memory usage.  :Very Happy: 

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## Tiger683

Don't even think about it... It'll mess your data up BIGTIME....

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## ExZombie

 *Tiger683 wrote:*   

> Don't even think about it... It'll mess your data up BIGTIME....

 

And you say this based on what?

I've been running reiser4 for months now and it's working like a charm. I admit I had some problems once, but it was due to my own stupidity and missing reiser4progs. fsck.reiser4 repaired what was to repair without a hitch, no data lost.

I believe it all depends on circumstances and the user. I managed to destroy data both on ext3 and reiserfs. If you want a good opinion, Chaos, make tests yourself to form your own opinion  :Smile:  .

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## Tiger683

Based on experience, since it destroyed my important data in a productive-environment (I know, stupid to use it there) i hate it very much...

Ever seen files disappear from your bin and home directory?

Though i include reiser4 in nitro-rt, because people want to crash their data, maybe in one week, maybe in a year, you never know the date and time...

And i assume you didn't want to flame me.... i hope it VERY MUCH....

EDIT: i hold it for just as unstable as xfs, a certain proprietary OS etc.

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## YeahSure

I've been running reiser4 since it came out in a home workstation environment and its been running fine all along.  One thing you might want to do is to ensure you have a boot disk with reiser4 support, like RIP or the reiser4 enabled Gentoo disk available through these forums.  Otherwise, if you do get messed up, you can't access the partition.

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## WladyX

I have reiser4 and had very few problems, most caused by X crashes or bad kernel pathes, but all togher it is stable enough to consider it.

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## rmh3093

i would say reiser4 is perfectly fine, most problem people experience are probably due to other faulty/experimental drivers or a poorly set up a system or a dieing hd.

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## mdshort

Since it requires less accessing the drive, does this mean my games should run faster?

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## WladyX

Maybe they would load a bit faster.

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## mdshort

Yea thats what I meant, like ut2004 has those really long loading times.

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## Vagabond

I had bad experiences with it too, I won't even consider it again until/if it reaches the mainline kernel. They pushed it out the door too fast IMO.

Vag

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## liber!

I have had no problems running reiser4, but to be safe I don't use it for my documents (using reiserfs instead)...

Groeten,

 Nathan

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## UB|K

I guess that reiser4 being stable or not greatly depends on every one experiences... 

I've been running it for about 4-5 month (except /boot and my important data) without a single problem.

The best way to know is to backup important data and give a try.

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## Hauser

I use a reiser4 partition for all the portage stuff (/usr/portage, /var/tmp/ccache, /var/tmp/portage), it works very well; I've used reiser4 for root partition before, but didn't notice much performance improvement over reiserfs except when doing emerge sync or dealing with a large number of files (such as untarring a backup tarball onto a reiser4 partition).

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## MrApples

i used reiser4 for about 8 months, and i just recently switched back to reiserfs, data corruption was far too prevalent, and i couldnt afford to lose any more data

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## bet1m

if you use reiser4, always do some backups  :Wink: 

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## freelight

I used reiser4 since it was in beta, and the only problems I've had with it were when the system didn't shut down cleanly (the data that was recently written was gone). I considered it stable enough to put on a server I'm running (granted, it isn't mission-critical and the important data is backed up).

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## WladyX

i'm also having the shutdown problem  :Smile: 

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## DrWoland

I'm running RR4 on 2.6.10-nitro4, some pretty crazy CFLAGS, have been compiling, burning, installing, extracting, downloading stuff and pretty much anything else you can think of. Nothing's gone wrong as of yet. Of course, it's only been ~2 weeks, but I really have NO complaints. Then again, I'm a risktaker. I took my hard-drive off the black list for the SiI3112 errata fix   :Shocked: 

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## codergeek42

Careful though...Reiser4 is in no way supported by the Gentoo dev team, so if something breaks you're on your own....

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## Chaos

thank you all for your responses.  Right now I'm thinking about setting up either a loopback file and putting reiser4 on it or testing it out on qemu and seeing if I can break it.  Last I heard most people had problems from migrating over and that new installs seemed to be generally doing fine.  Certainly it has probably been one of the most controversial filesystems created in a while, if not ever for linux but I do hope they get it up to spec and into the stable branch or at least the mm patchset sometime soon.

Thanks again everyone, I would certainly love to know what more people think!

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## Tiger683

it's already been in mm for a while...  :Wink: 

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## Chaos

really?  I guess I should have been paying more attention   :Very Happy: 

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## a13x

For me, a dream came true today, thank God. I finally installed and configured Gentoo with NPTL, udev, GCC 3.4.3, linux-2.6.11-r2-nitro1 and Reiser4. I had big problems during the install and it took me about a week to acomplish this. I used the "Stage 1 on Stage 3" install method in order to achieve this. THX guys for documenting this.

Anyway I had Gentoo with reiserfs in the past and I must admit that Reiser4 really is fast. I dunno if it's just that or a combination of all this cool bleeding edge stuff, but I'm impressed. A huge step forward for Linux.

I realize that Reiser4 can be dangerous to use so I decided to make a tarball of my install and copy it somewhere safe, weekly. Following this policy and keeping your important data on a stable filesystem like ext3 should make using Reiser4 almost risk-free.

Have phun with it, if you decide to use it.

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## Jake

reiser4 is mostly stable on x86. If it was completely stable, it would be in vanilla. You'll notice a speed boost for certain tasks, and you'll notice improved space efficiency for small files (/usr/portage, for example). Don't use reiser4 if you don't have CPU cycles to spare. This shouldn't be an issue if your hardware is relatively modern, but don't use reiser4 on a P133.

Theoretically, the only way you'll lose data is if you reboot before fsyncing. It's possible to have files go missing if you created them just before a hard reset. the advantage, however, is that your fs should never get corrupted from hard resets because your transactions either completely succeed or completely fail.

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## MrApples

yes that all made me very confident wheni started using it, but errors still came

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## Xithix

 *Jake wrote:*   

> Theoretically, the only way you'll lose data is if you reboot before fsyncing. It's possible to have files go missing if you created them just before a hard reset. the advantage, however, is that your fs should never get corrupted from hard resets because your transactions either completely succeed or completely fail.

 

Theoretically.  My reiser4 box (which recently failed for an unrelated reason) had file corruptions after most hard resets.  Some of them were severe enough to have to run  fsck.reiser4 with --build-fs because --fix was too weak.

If you don't screw up things like the Xorg config with errors that cause it to hard freeze (I was guilty of this), you won't need to hard reset, but the time spend fscking a drive is greater than the speed increase imo.

I would recommend reiser 3.6 until it goes into vanilla.

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## MrApples

i really agree with this, also, as a somewhat related note, i once lost all data when running --build-fs after some corruption

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## Jake

 *Xithix wrote:*   

> Theoretically.  My reiser4 box (which recently failed for an unrelated reason) had file corruptions after most hard resets.  Some of them were severe enough to have to run  fsck.reiser4 with --build-fs because --fix was too weak.
> 
> If you don't screw up things like the Xorg config with errors that cause it to hard freeze (I was guilty of this), you won't need to hard reset, but the time spend fscking a drive is greater than the speed increase imo.
> 
> I would recommend reiser 3.6 until it goes into vanilla.

 

As I understand reiser4, you should never have to run fsck.reiser4 --fix, much less --build-fs. It might suffer from the same problem as BSD UFS with softupdates, that writes get cached on ATA drives, defeating atomic transfers, but you'd have to ask on the mailing list for a definitive answer. If the problem isn't caching, you should have reported a bug. As I recall, I've made it through every hard reset on x86 without needing to --fix or --build-fs. Of course I've been using reiser4 for almost a year, so I might be forgetting something from the days when there were still known bugs.

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## MrApples

i dont think that our problem is unique tho, ive heard it from many people

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## Archangel1

 *Jake wrote:*   

> As I understand reiser4, you should never have to run fsck.reiser4 --fix, much less --build-fs. ...<snip>... As I recall, I've made it through every hard reset on x86 without needing to --fix or --build-fs. Of course I've been using reiser4 for almost a year, so I might be forgetting something from the days when there were still known bugs.

 

Yeah atomic file transfers blah blah... I've had to fsck a couple of times in the past, generally when I got pissed off beacuse something else had broken and powered off during heavy hdd activity. Not my finest moment...

Anyway, I would have expected reiser4 to cope with this, but it didn't. Both times --build-fs was required.

I think that was about nine/ten months ago now - I forget exactly, but it's been rock solid for me with the more recent snapshots. The only issue I find is if it loses power unexpectedly, a few recent transactions can be lost - like the last minute's worth. Looks like there might be some serious write caching occurring?

But I don't think that can count against calling it stable; that is an unexpected poweroff so I guess it's taking no chances with corrupted data. The rest of the time it's been fine.

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## Jake

 *Archangel1 wrote:*   

> I think that was about nine/ten months ago now - I forget exactly, but it's been rock solid for me with the more recent snapshots. The only issue I find is if it loses power unexpectedly, a few recent transactions can be lost - like the last minute's worth. Looks like there might be some serious write caching occurring?
> 
> But I don't think that can count against calling it stable; that is an unexpected poweroff so I guess it's taking no chances with corrupted data. The rest of the time it's been fine.

 

That's the fsync issue. There was something on the mailing list about it recently. An atom commits when it gets too large, too old, or when fsync is called.

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## Archangel1

 *Jake wrote:*   

> That's the fsync issue. There was something on the mailing list about it recently. An atom commits when it gets too large, too old, or when fsync is called.

 

Ah right. Thanks for clearing that up.

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## IWBCMAN

I have been running reiserfs4 on 2 machines since it came out. Have yet to have any problems whatsoever.

If you are worried make tarball backups of non-replacable stuff....

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## Lepaca Kliffoth

Reiser4 has always worked fine for me. Once something ugly happened and the system crashed very hard, however after a reboot my files were still there. The changes I had done in the last few seconds were somehow canceled, a couple of files were back in the directory from where I had moved them and a small text file I had copied from a disk had disappeared. I never experienced any kind of data corruption.

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## Varuna

I've been trying it for several months now, and about one month ago, I moved absolutely everything except /boot onto Reiser4 partitions. Over these months, the file system became corrupted twice, though I can't necessarily correlate the corruption with hard resets. In both cases, repeated applications of --build-fs and --fix restored the corrupted partition with no data loss. In one of those cases, I was unable to chroot into the affected partition even after file system consistency was restored, but I was still able to copy my files to another partition.

I have two similar but independent Gentoo installations on my hard drive, both on Reiser4, so I can get work done by using the backup installation while reformating a corrupted partition, then copying my files back to the reformated partition, if necessary. It works very well.

Conclusions: I wouldn't use Reiser4 if you need to emphasize stability, but if spending twenty minutes every couple of months fixing something is acceptable, it is very workable, and in return, it is incredibly fast and efficient  :Smile: . And, of course, its stability should only get better!

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## m0sia

I bought new computer in august, then i created reiser4 root partition and copied root from old harddisk. Then i started reemerging world with new CFLAGS for new P4 processors. The system hangs and i lost all newly emerged data and fresh distfiles. =((( after that i reformatted partition in reiserfs. Now i thinking about reiser4, maybe now it is more stable?

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## DCatcher

 *Hauser wrote:*   

> I use a reiser4 partition for all the portage stuff (/usr/portage, /var/tmp/ccache, /var/tmp/portage), it works very well; I've used reiser4 for root partition before, but didn't notice much performance improvement over reiserfs except when doing emerge sync or dealing with a large number of files (such as untarring a backup tarball onto a reiser4 partition).

 

I'm using Reiser4 for /usr/portage, too. So I need just 120MB for all the current ebuilds. (You'll need much more with other fs.) I also think about putting /var/tmp on an Reiser4 partition, too, but I have no clue how much disc place I'll need. So if anyone can tell me some numbers, I'll be happy  :Smile: Last edited by DCatcher on Mon Feb 14, 2005 1:43 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## fallow

I`m using reiser4 since 0.5.x , and all the time on whole '/' since 1.0

for me is stable now.  I have no problems with hard resets and etc. I had serious problem once and fsck.reiser4 --build-fs fixed it. I have backup , but I have it always ( in the past with reiser3,xfs,jfs also ) . Backup is the prior thing  :Very Happy:   :Smile: 

For me minus of reiser4 is it implementation.depending oh idea it`s high performance and very high cpu usage filesystem and in effect of this = some problems during heavy I/O load. problems likes lags,slow downs  - less interactivity. 

It`s best visible with 2.6.11-rcX and Staircase. So for whole '/' reiser4 usage and prevent of lags/slow downs is good to have O(1) or Nick`s Scheduler as CPU Sched.

cheers.

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## Moloch

I've been using reiser4 for about 4 months now. I'm running it on top of lvm2. I use reier4 on /tmp /var /usr /home. I use xfs on storage and a few other mounts where I mostly store large files. I've had hardlocks numerous times playing with nvidia and xorg. Haven't had any data corruption yet. Downside with reiser4 is no resizing. So with lvm2 I cannot reisize. Which is why I use xfs on storage partitions that I would want to resize. xfs can resize a partition while it's mounted  :Shocked: 

I use ext3 on /boot and /

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## Debentoo_Gao

I got a problem with reiser4 as my root file system. I found some win software running with wine can't use in reiser4,but they work perfectly in my xfs based system.I don't know why:oops:

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## MasterX

If you start with reiser3.6 can you then update the filesystems to reiser4?

Is it wise to assume that reiser3.6 is as safe as ext3 is?

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## Jake

 *MasterX wrote:*   

> If you start with reiser3.6 can you then update the filesystems to reiser4?
> 
> Is it wise to assume that reiser3.6 is as safe as ext3 is?

 

reiser4 is a completely different filesystem and you can't upgrade from reiserfs. ext3 seems to deal with bad hardware better than reiserfs, but otherwise it isn't significantly safer.

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## syouth

 *Jake wrote:*   

>  *MasterX wrote:*   If you start with reiser3.6 can you then update the filesystems to reiser4?
> 
> Is it wise to assume that reiser3.6 is as safe as ext3 is? 
> 
> reiser4 is a completely different filesystem and you can't upgrade from reiserfs. ext3 seems to deal with bad hardware better than reiserfs, but otherwise it isn't significantly safer.

 Roger! I had problems with my new harddrive. It was in use for 3 weeks and had reiserfs (v3) and my music data on it. Then strange things occured: I was playing mp3 files and then some clibbering noise and silence. I umounted and did fsck. There were too many errors to count. I didn't know, it was hardware problem then and thought that reiserfs had gone crazy. After some more checks and thougts "let's hope this solved it!  -- but no!", I made additional ext3 partitions on that drive and copied my media there. Everything was ok for a week more, but still there was this queer feeling, that everything's not right. Then strange things came to happen again and I went deeper to investigate. dmesg showed some ugly things and all was clear. I went to shop and they gave me new harddrive, that is working right now (phew!) without problems. I was near to complete loss of my music files - I lost some, but rescued nearly all that were important. If I had taken this reiserfs misfunction more seriously, the data loss would have been zero. 

My point is: Yes! Reiserfs is more sensitive, which is good thing.

Now I run my reiser4 and older reiserfs / from that drive and everything seems to be smooth. /home is reiser4 too. But media data is still on reiserfs and ext3, 'till reiser4 comes to offially supported.

So if you have some room on your hdd to spare, give a try to reiser4. :)

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## acasto

I just had some problems with my reiser4 partition as well. However it was directly after a kernel re-compile where I had just thrown in and torn out some rough patches. And I also compile it with -O3 cflags. So I ran a make mrproper and recompiled at -O2. fsck.reiser4 worked find, but I went ahead and restored from a backup because I was wanting to shift around some partition anyways to free up some space to play with a BSD.

- Adam

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## MasterX

 *syouth wrote:*   

> 
> 
> So if you have some room on your hdd to spare, give a try to reiser4. 

 

I have room to spare, but I do not want to lose my data. So, I will go for the reiser3.6, since it is more efficient than ext3.

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## syouth

 *MasterX wrote:*   

>  *syouth wrote:*   
> 
> So if you have some room on your hdd to spare, give a try to reiser4. :) 
> 
> I have room to spare, but I do not want to lose my data. So, I will go for the reiser3.6, since it is more efficient than ext3.

 What you mean by "losing data"? If you mean your media/documents and other unique stuff, then they are staying in stable partitions (ext3, reiserfs, etc.). If something happens with /, you will lose only your system. You don't have to delete your current /. It can stay as a stable working system and you can return to that any time you want.

Or what you mean?

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## MasterX

 *syouth wrote:*   

>  *MasterX wrote:*    *syouth wrote:*   
> 
> So if you have some room on your hdd to spare, give a try to reiser4.  
> 
> I have room to spare, but I do not want to lose my data. So, I will go for the reiser3.6, since it is more efficient than ext3. What you mean by "losing data"? If you mean your media/documents and other unique stuff, then they are staying in stable partitions (ext3, reiserfs, etc.). If something happens with /, you will lose only your system. You don't have to delete your current /. It can stay as a stable working system and you can return to that any time you want.
> ...

 

I will do a fresh install of Gentoo on my notebook, and I am thinking of using a different, more efficient, filesystem than ext3.

You are suggesting to have reiser3.6 for the home directory and reiser4 for all the other directories (/, /var,/usr). This is a possible configuration. Or maybe I can have the home directory and / reiser3.6 and all the others reiser4. So that I can always boot into Linux and emerge whatever was broken.

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## rush_ad

i was thinking about using reiser4 on my media and docs data. is R4 good enough to store my movies and songs without any data loss possibilities?

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## WladyX

Hey i use r4 for a few months on my / (which includes /home), so far no big problems. I'm very happy with it.

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## rush_ad

thanks, i will give it a try.

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## 0n0w1c

I have had little long term luck with R4. While I can successfully install it, I lose the fs eventually... as in lose it all. I get i/o errors when attempting to write and when I do a ls on thr fs, I see nothing on the partition even though a chkfs says the fs is okay. I suspect it has something to do with my mirrored scsi drives (software mirroring) and SMP.

I have recently upgraded to a hardware raid controller using 1+0 and I might try it again. I will pass along any info of my experiences.

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## jannis

 *Quote:*   

> I'm using Reiser4 for /usr/portage, too. So I need just 120MB for all the current ebuilds. (You'll need much more with other fs.) I also think about putting /var/tmp on an Reiser4 partition, too, but I have no clue how much disc place I'll need. So if anyone can tell me some numbers, I'll be happy Smile

 

Depends on what you build. OpenOffice.org can need more than 2 GB to compile.

 *Quote:*   

> I have had little long term luck with R4. While I can successfully install it, I lose the fs eventually... as in lose it all. I get i/o errors when attempting to write and when I do a ls on thr fs, I see nothing on the partition even though a chkfs says the fs is okay. I suspect it has something to do with my mirrored scsi drives (software mirroring) and SMP. 

 

Either it is the mirroring or something is bloody wrong with your hard drives.

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## WladyX

 *jannis wrote:*   

> Either it is the mirroring or something is bloody wrong with your hard drives.

 

Or maybe a badly patched kernel.

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## rush_ad

i'd like to try out reiser4 but only problem is that no other distro will be able to read reiser4. such as suse, it will need the reiser4 support. so i am still debating

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## codergeek42

 *rush_ad wrote:*   

> i'd like to try out reiser4 but only problem is that no other distro will be able to read reiser4. such as suse, it will need the reiser4 support. so i am still debating

 You _do_ know you're not required to use vendor kernels, right? *shrug*

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## WladyX

 *rush_ad wrote:*   

> i'd like to try out reiser4 but only problem is that no other distro will be able to read reiser4. such as suse, it will need the reiser4 support. so i am still debating

 

It's no a matter of distros. it's a matter of patching the kernel, besides gentoo i also have a slack on reiser4  :Razz: 

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## MasterX

So, reiser4 is not supported? You have to patch the kernel? Is there a patch for the vanilla version of the kernel?

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## WladyX

 *MasterX wrote:*   

> So, reiser4 is not supported? You have to patch the kernel? Is there a patch for the vanilla version of the kernel?

 

Yes, i usualy use gentoo-dev-sources and i patch them with the  reiser4 patch, but for 2.6.11 there isn't an official patch for the vanilla yet.

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## Morbo

I've had pretty bad luck with ReiserFS file systems but, to its credit, I've always been able to recover through the reiserfs tools. It's also hard to tell exactly what to blame, flakey IDE controllers, power failures, lockups, etc are more to blame than Reiser in most cases I suspect. I think all the modern file systems are pretty good as long as you have a stable system and a UPS.

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## Deranger

I used it 3 months, but then I returned to ext3. I can only see difference between ext3 and Reiser4 when syncing Portage tree or diffing kernel trees. Maybe I'll switch back someday...

Reiser4 is pretty stable on x86.

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## codergeek42

 *Oktane wrote:*   

> Reiser4 is pretty stable on x86.

 ...And that's about it. Try it on any other arch and it's horribly  broken; or so I've read...

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## drakos7

Been running reiser4 here on my laptop for 4+ months without a single hiccup. I am one of the daring ones who put it on / (with ext2 on /boot)

Works great. Yes, ~x86 install. 

YMMV (your milage may vary)

BNI (batteries not included)

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## Deranger

 *drakos7 wrote:*   

> I am one of the daring ones who put it on /

 

I had almost 1 TB worth of data on Reiser4, including /  :Rolling Eyes: 

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## Jake

 *codergeek42 wrote:*   

>  *Oktane wrote:*   Reiser4 is pretty stable on x86. ...And that's about it. Try it on any other arch and it's horribly  broken; or so I've read...

 

It might work on AMD64 now. I've had a few lockups, but I seem to be the only one having problems and things were a little flaky before I switched to reiser4. Obviously I keep full backups.

EDIT: I'm quite confident with reiser4 on AMD64 now. I have nearly a month of uptime, so my lockup issue has been resolved. Also, I know PPC doesn't work at all (won't mount) and Namesys considers getting into vanilla a priority over fixing the bug.Last edited by Jake on Wed May 11, 2005 5:46 am; edited 1 time in total

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## holst

lol. I was reading this thread and just stumble over a funny quote

 *codergeek42 wrote:*   

> Careful though...Reiser4 is in no way supported by the Gentoo dev team, so if something breaks you're on your own....

 

remeber this kids: you're always on your own if you're not willing to pay hard cash to somebody to fix your mess. and that goes for any possible mess made by others on your turf too.  :Smile: 

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## Sparohok

Speaking of funny quotes:

 *Morbo wrote:*   

> I think all the modern file systems are pretty good as long as you have a stable system and a UPS.

 

Most antique filesystems are pretty good too, as long as you have a stable system and a UPS.

Fault tolerance is the raison d'etre for modern journalling filesystems.

Martin

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## Pink

 *rush_ad wrote:*   

> i'd like to try out reiser4 but only problem is that no other distro will be able to read reiser4. such as suse, it will need the reiser4 support. so i am still debating

 

Just to let you know that Suse 9.3 does support reiser4. I have it working right now with a spare r4 partition. I do not recommend r4 as I think it is still unstable and very unreliable (having lost a lot of data in the past I am very wary of it), but there are more and more distros supporting it.

May help in a decision.

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## rjreb

Just my own experience... I took a chance and put reiserfs4 on a production qmail server on the /var/vpopmail/domains and /var/spool/qmailscan directories over a year ago. Not one single problem.

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## Phlogiston

I know that this thread is old, but has there changed a lot during this time about reiser4 stableness? I consider using it on my new amd64 notebook? What do you think?

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## vipernicus

 *Phlogiston. wrote:*   

> I know that this thread is old, but has there changed a lot during this time about reiser4 stableness? I consider using it on my new amd64 notebook? What do you think?

 

If I were you, I'd setup ext3 /w dir_index and full_journal options.  Awesome latency, and gives more memory and processor to your applications.  Do a Quick Search: on the forums on Ext3 Filesystem Tips by codergeek42.  Fast and Reliable, and can be accessed from Windows XP unlike Reiser4 or Reiser3.6

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## crazycat

Well i used reiser4 for a while now and i kind of reverted to reiser3 for root filesystem cause its a pain in the ass to patch each time u upgrade a kernel and grub doesn't support it (i dont use boot partition , only backup kernels on different filesystems and a backup cd). I also didn't like the heavy cpu usage while copyng large files  but for example ut2k4 loading times were shorter with reiser4, but it kind of degrades responsitiveness while using so much cpu. I now use reiser3 for root cause of great performance with lots of small files and sane cpu usage and ext3 for ~200gb /home mainly because i can mount it in windows on demand if i need some space. I also found a pair of interesting links about this:

http://www.willsmith.org/opensource/reiser4/fragperf/

and

http://navindra.blogspot.com/2004/10/kde-dot-news-ext3s-miserable-failure.html

I dont really know what to think about this all filesystem mess , i think ext3 is more of a hack  build on top of top of ext2 with other hacks added later like dir_index , which grows big and slow and inefficent, like windows (you know the story , lots of layers == lots of speed issues ) where reiser was more some new experiment, whether it succeded or not is another question.

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