# reiser4 final - horror stories

## neuron

anyone seen any yet?  I kinda figured I'd see a few "it's fast but dont do XXX" fairly quickly, not that I'm paying attention, but does anyone have any horror stories on reiser4 final yet?

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## miseiler

 *neuron wrote:*   

> anyone seen any yet?  I kinda figured I'd see a few "it's fast but dont do XXX" fairly quickly, not that I'm paying attention, but does anyone have any horror stories on reiser4 final yet?

 

Working great here.

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## Bigun

New filesystem?

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## Nate_S

Suprisingly, as I've been casually following the reiser4 news, I have yet to see any reports of lost data.  I have heard a few reports of crashes under load, or it not performing like it should, etc., but no lost data. (feel free to correct me if this is not the case)

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## miseiler

 *Nate_S wrote:*   

> Suprisingly, as I've been casually following the reiser4 news, I have yet to see any reports of lost data.  I have heard a few reports of crashes under load, or it not performing like it should, etc., but no lost data. (feel free to correct me if this is not the case)

 

Shouldn't be that surprising   :Wink: 

The whole idea behind atomicity rather than metadata journalling is to eliminate any conditions where data loss is even possible.

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## mmealman

 *miseiler wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Shouldn't be that surprising  
> 
> The whole idea behind atomicity rather than metadata journalling is to eliminate any conditions where data loss is even possible.

 

Considering it's a .0 release of a brand new filesystem, yeah it's suprising. It usually takes a solid year before a new filesystem is stable enough that people aren't seeing their hard drives randomly getting wiped.

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## asimon

I had a frozen rsync yesterday while rsyncing ~16 GB from one reiser4 partition to an other reiser4 partition. I was in single user mode and couldn't stop the process, hard disc activity was zero when I came back to the console and noticed the hanging rsync. After a rebooting no fs had errors but there where no files copied to the destination. I can't tell if it was reiser4's fault or rsync or the kernel or my bad karma.

Besides that I have reiser4 running on some non-critical data partitions where it is used for some heavy-duty compiling, no problems so far. But still I wait at least for two or three further bug-fix releases before I even play with the tought of using it for important data too.

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## neuron

 *asimon wrote:*   

> Besides that I have reiser4 running on some non-critical data partitions where it is used for some heavy-duty compiling, no problems so far. But still I wait at least for two or three further bug-fix releases before I even play with the tought of using it for important data too.

 

yeah, I totally agree, I'm playing with the idea of putting it on my laptop, just surprised I haven't seen more eeek it ate my data messages  :Wink: 

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## syadnom

running reiser4 on my laptop.  have been running pre-releases for sometime and moved up to file as soon as the patch for gentoo-dev-sources was out in the forums here.

i run gentoo-dev-sources-r3 right now with the reiser4 patch available right here in the  forums and have had absolutely no problems.

did have a performance issue as i used the tar method to move my data off the drive and back on, the fix was to boot the reiser4 gentoo boot disk and copy the files from old directory to a new one so that reiser4 could reorder and repack the data for speed, then no problems.

works great, even when battery dies  in middle of work, atomic filesystems rock!

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## Gandalf the White

Well, yesterday I rebuilt my system from scratch, on  a new reiser4 partition. Unfortunately Reedeman hasn't finished his newest and I couldn't wait, so I built it using 0.5.5 snapshot from June 23 I think. Anyway.... I was in love at first tar -xvjpf stage1........... Wow, this works great, my system is running faster and better than it ever has before. On reiser3 xmms used to choke if I had more than 3 things compiling at the same time, Yesterday I had 5 things compiling, listening to xmms, on top of plain xorg, and not a single choke. Anyone have any ideas how I could upgrade the reiser4 to the latest without reedeman's livecd?

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## will_in_wi

I switched the entire system over to reiser4 when it was released. Not a hiccup yet.

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## Robin79

Damm i just want to convert my old reiserfs3 to reiserfs4 but i cant i must format the disks  :Sad: 

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## Realmaker

I'm just copying files to an old disk  :Smile: 

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## wdreinhart

It's been working alright for me for the last 2 months now.  There are a few "gotcha!" situations you need to watch for.  First, you can't resize reiser4 filesystems yet.  (Mr Reiser is hoping someone will pay him to implement this in the future)  Second, current (post-1.0) versions of fsck.reiser4 don't recognize  filesystems created with mkfs.reiser4 < 1.0.  You'll have to use debugfs.reiser4 -C to update those filesystems to the new backup block format before you can fsck them again.

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## miseiler

 *wdreinhart wrote:*   

> It's been working alright for me for the last 2 months now.  There are a few "gotcha!" situations you need to watch for.  First, you can't resize reiser4 filesystems yet.  (Mr Reiser is hoping someone will pay him to implement this in the future)  Second, current (post-1.0) versions of fsck.reiser4 don't recognize  filesystems created with mkfs.reiser4 < 1.0.  You'll have to use debugfs.reiser4 -C to update those filesystems to the new backup block format before you can fsck them again.

 

Question: Mine's created with 1.00 and I've had absolutely no problems with it so far.  To run the newer fsck.reiser4 will I need to update?  You mention versions less than 1.00 and after 1.00...I'm pretty sure you meant 1.00+, but I just want to clarify.   :Smile: 

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## syadnom

fyi,

for anyone with enough space OR an extra drive, DONT tar up your system.  just use cp.  this was reiser4 will realign and repack day and you can avoid the performance hit many people are experiencing with converted systems.

i just 

mk /usr.new

cp -p /usr /usr.new

mv /usr /usr.old

mv /usr.new /usr

if you have any trouble,boot from a reiser4 enabled cd to do this.

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## -Sarbian-

 *miseiler wrote:*   

>  *wdreinhart wrote:*   It's been working alright for me for the last 2 months now.  There are a few "gotcha!" situations you need to watch for.  First, you can't resize reiser4 filesystems yet.  (Mr Reiser is hoping someone will pay him to implement this in the future)  Second, current (post-1.0) versions of fsck.reiser4 don't recognize  filesystems created with mkfs.reiser4 < 1.0.  You'll have to use debugfs.reiser4 -C to update those filesystems to the new backup block format before you can fsck them again. 
> 
> Question: Mine's created with 1.00 and I've had absolutely no problems with it so far.  To run the newer fsck.reiser4 will I need to update?  You mention versions less than 1.00 and after 1.00...I'm pretty sure you meant 1.00+, but I just want to clarify.  

 

Before the release the version number was 0.5X. If you created your fs with version 1.0X you don t need to upgrade.

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## Realmaker

Is it possible to create a partition with an older version, install gentoo on it and convert it later to 1.0?

I don't want to wait for a new Redeeman live-cd  :Very Happy: 

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## RexM

If somebody came out with a tool that would allow you to convert a reiserfs partition to a reiserfs4 partition... I might actually praise them and shower them with flowers and gifts.

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## syadnom

i filesystem conversion program would be iffy.

first, reiser4 partitions can't be resized(yet).

if they could, and the source filesystem could as well, then you could simply have  a script resize the source filesystem to the smallest possible size, create a reiser4 partition and move files over, they resize the original again as the free space would now be available to shrink it more and the cycle continues.

OR

the partitions information could be stored into ram(or in a recovery files on the boot partition.)

a program could systematically cache data to ram starting and sector 0, erase the sector and start building a new reiser4 filesystem behind it.  i think this would be dangeerous though.

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## CRV§ADER//KY

 :Shocked:  wooooooo.......   :Shocked:  I'm looking at the benchmarks right now....

http://www.namesys.com/benchmarks.html

ZERO performance loss when reading/writing on 8 simultaneous streams.....

I love it.   :Embarassed: 

I'm definitely going to do it at least on my root partition within the next 3 months (while I'll wait at least 6 months to use it on my 100Gb-worth data partition....   :Rolling Eyes:  )

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## yinyang

It is surely worth of giving it a try, but I wouldn't believe a benchmark from the creator  :Wink: 

Does anyone have any independent benchmarks?

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## Gentree

I have been using R4 since the begining of the year. Never had any problems.

I use it for portage (including portage_tmpdir where the compiling gets done) since it seems that R4 is strongest on large numbers of small files.

For a small number of large files (audio , video , cd images etc) xfs is probably a better choise.

Just do a search if you want some benchmarks.

HTH 

@neuron

You may like to change the title of this thread, it unfairly gives the impression that there are substantial problems with R4. That is far from from what you are actually saying but it looks bad in the forum index.  :Cool: 

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## senzacionale

i would like to know if reiser4 will be 100% compatitable with NTFS! Can we write on it without loosing any data!

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## Gentree

Apparently there are issues with R4 and NFS (network file system) not to be confused with NTFS.

If you directly mount a windows NTFS partition under Linux it is the kernel that handles the file IO for that device and it should have no bearing on what other file systems you  may or may not be using on other partitions.

HTH  :Cool: 

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## neuron

 *senzacionale wrote:*   

> i would like to know if reiser4 will be 100% compatitable with NTFS! Can we write on it without loosing any data!

 

those are two completly different filesystems, no, that won't be possible.

but you can use captive (google captive ntfs) to read and write to a ntfs filesystem.

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## Chaosite

To clarify:

Reiser4 is completely "compatible" (Its a different filesystem!) with NTFS.

You can have a NTFS partition, and beside it a Reiser4 partition, and they will both be fine...

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## syscrash

I recently re-installed my gentoo system with reiser4. All seemed good at first, but enemy territory hiccups whenever messages appear, or objectives are completed. I will be trying reiserfs (3) on friday to see whether reiser4 was the culprit. I have a feeling that it IS reiser4  :Shocked: 

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## GaMMa

I've been using Reiser4 for a week now and I'm happy with it. At first I was having horrible slowdowns, but then I found out it was a mm-sources bug, switching to ck-sources everything is fine. I don't even think that was reiser4 related. Untarring kernel sources to a directory is really fast and emerge rsyncs are blazing fast. I came from using an ext3 install from the last 2 years. This is a fast filesystem, the benchmarks don't lie!

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## Safrax

I'm having lockups when I run the nightly SpamAssassin scan on my maildir for new items to add to the bayesian filter stuff.  Thats about it though.

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## syscrash

 *syscrash2k wrote:*   

> I recently re-installed my gentoo system with reiser4. All seemed good at first, but enemy territory hiccups whenever messages appear, or objectives are completed. I will be trying reiserfs (3) on friday to see whether reiser4 was the culprit. I have a feeling that it IS reiser4 

 

Alright, I tried going to reiserfs (3) and it didn't help the problem. I did manage to get it solved though, I think it was a mix of fixing the mtrr used by the fglrx driver and lowering agp aperture.

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## seasick

is it true that reiser4 is 4 times as fast as ntfs?

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## black hole sun

 *seasick wrote:*   

> is it true that reiser4 is 4 times as fast as ntfs?

 Well since you can't use NTFS on linux I fail to see how that's relevant  :Wink:  But yeah, it's lightning-quick. I can't wait to see the gentoo devs fully support this in the near future!

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## seasick

I'll give it a try. Hey nice nickname.

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