Re: [gentoo-dev] reiserfs

[Jean-Michel Smith <jsmith@kcco.com>]

On Tuesday 14 May 2002 10:07 am, Alexander Gretencord wrote:

> Well, many people have run it without problems. SuSE even ships it with
> their distribution since ages (before it got into the main kernel tree).
> Without an explanation _why_ you think it's not stable enough the statement
> is worth nothing. So ACK, this definately needs an entry.

First, an appeal to authority (Suse in this case) is a logical fallacy you 
should not engage in.  Just because Suse ships reiser with their distribution 
doesn't make it stable or safe for production use.

In fact, a friend of mine who runs a computer consultancy, and uses Suse in 
nearly all of his installations, was bitten very badly by a reiserfs bug that 
resulted in near-catastrophic data loss.  I say near, because he was able to 
recover from backup tapes.  Nevertheless it resulted in an allnighter getting 
the system back up, on a more reliable ext2 filesystem, followed by several 
days work as he moved other installations off of reiser and onto ext2 (his 
choice, not mine ... I probably would have opted for JFS or ext3 in his 
particular case).

I have personally witnessed data loss using reiser on numerous occasions ... 
symptoms ranged from strange "undeletable" files that were corrupt, to entire 
directory trees vanishing for no apparent reason (but the disk usage 
remaining unchanged).  No recovery was possible in either case (short of 
reconstructing a new filesystem from scratch and restoring from backups).

In all these cases all of us had all been using reiserfs "for months with no 
problems" ... and we still suffered severe data loss.

Reiserfs is NOT ready for production use, and the gentoo FAQ is both wise and 
friendly for pointing that out and guiding people away from that particular 
folly.

There are plenty of other, much safer filesystems to use, including XFS (if 
you don't need bleeding edge experimental features, e.g. can be happy with 
stock 2.4.18 kernel + xfs patches), JFS, ext3, ext2 (no journalling), and so 
forth.  I know people tend to get very emotionally attached to whatever 
filesystem they like, but this IMHO is unwise ... one should be very agnostic 
about what fs one chooses to use, rather than defending a particular choice 
"to the death" as seems so common with software these days.

That having been said, there is a plethora of hard evidence as well as 
anectdotal experiences to learn from, and to indicate that reiser really 
isn't a safe choice to be making.  This is reflected in the gentoo 
installation documentation, IMHO exactly as it should be. 

Jean.