[gentoo-dev] Lilo and Reiserfs

[gentoo-dev] Lilo and Reiserfs

[Rod Roark]

Hi, I have a couple of comments, and a question.

Your reiserfs-bashing is obsolete.  :-)  I've been using it
for the past 5 months on a colocated server and find it to 
be fast, space-efficient and stable.  The only stability 
problem I had was at the very beginning and was traced to 
faulty memory (reiser seems to be unforgiving of hardware 
problems).

Also option "notail" is no longer a requirement with lilo
(and I believe grub).  This was fixed over a year ago.
You can find this info in the lilo changelog.

Which brings me to my question.  I want to use lilo, and I
don't want a separate boot partition.  However lilo refuses
to install without /boot in fstab.  How can I get around
this?

Thanks for a GREAT distribution!

-- Rod
   http://www.sunsetsystems.com/

Re: [gentoo-dev] Lilo and Reiserfs

[Bruce A. Locke]

On Mon, 2002-04-01 at 11:22, Rod Roark wrote:
> Hi, I have a couple of comments, and a question.
> 
> Your reiserfs-bashing is obsolete.  :-)

Oh, they finally redid their fsck tool so it didn't segfault half way
through and eat perfectly fine partitions?  You mean the numerous
bugfixes making their way into the recent kernel releases had nothing to
do with reiserfs file corruption? :)

We used to recommend reiserfs... we stopped for a reason :(

> I've been using it
> for the past 5 months on a colocated server and find it to 
> be fast, space-efficient and stable.  The only stability 
> problem I had was at the very beginning and was traced to 
> faulty memory (reiser seems to be unforgiving of hardware 
> problems).

I've had squid boxes where reiserfs was fine for months.  I've also had
workstations that have died horribly... the same hardware where ext3 and
xfs have 0 problems... *shrug*  I've personally found that under load
the only things reiserfs is really faster then XFS for are file
deletions.  XFS brings to the table a stable on disk format, acls,
extended attributes, etc and a _working_ fsck tool.

Don't mean to turn this into an XFS vs reiserfs flamewar but just trying
to point out one of many reasons why we don't recommend reiserfs
anymore.

> Which brings me to my question.  I want to use lilo, and I
> don't want a separate boot partition.  However lilo refuses
> to install without /boot in fstab.  How can I get around
> this?

Yes, the lilo ebuild currently isn't too intellegent about this issue.
The grub ebuild is much more intellegent about this issue but I've been
waiting for the eclass implementation to stabalize before having the
code shared between both ebuilds.  Its on my todo list :/

For now edit the lilo ebuild and completely remove the pkg_setup()
function and it should work for you.


-- 

Bruce A. Locke
blocke@shivan.org