Re: [gentoo-user] planned btrfs conversion: questions

[Marc Joliet <marcec@gmx.de>]

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Am Sun, 11 May 2014 09:53:10 +0100
schrieb Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com>:

> On Saturday 10 May 2014 10:33:19 William Kenworthy wrote:
> > Note that as I said in my original
> > email, "dirvish" really hammers a file system and only reiserfs seems to
> > withstand it though I have gotten errors with it in the past.  Ive tried
> > ext4 (takes only a couple of backup sessions and its unrecoverable,
> > btrfs an occasional error with two complete losses of the
> > partition/filesystem since Christmas and reiserfs gets rare errors.
> 
> 
> I moved away from reisefs to ext4 because I was getting some random lockups 
> when I/O was high.  While on reiserfs I also had a couple of corrupt mysql 
> files and all around poor performance.  Now, this was on a machine with a 
> deficient PSU (I replaced a couple of capacitors since then and it is now 
> working properly) so I don't want to blame the filesystem because of this 
> hardware problem.  In any case, under these impaired conditions ext4 was a 
> much better performing filesystem than reiserfs.  No lock ups, significantly 
> faster and no corruption was observed in normal operation - I didn't try to 
> hammer it.
> 
> So I read your paragraph above with surprise, because in my experience the 
> opposite was true.  At the time I thought that reiserfs was perhaps suffering 
> from bitrot, because these symptoms had gotten worse over time.  This is on an 
> installation running since 2005.  Not sure what to conclude from these 
> anecdotal observations ...  :-/

I remember that OpenSuse also changed their default from ReiserFS to Ext3 for
similar reasons [0]. I never experienced any problems with ReiserFS, but I also
got the impression that it was going nowhere and that if I wanted a reliable
system, Ext4 was the way to go.

Although funnily enough, when browsing through the btrfs ML, Duncan [1] shares
William's experience of ReiserFS being more resilient than even Ext4. In fact,
he writes that one reason he trusts btrfs to the degree he does is that Chris
Mason (the btrfs lead developer, for those who don't know) has a history with
ReiserFS (he used to work on it for SuSE [2]).

So yeah, as has been said already, everyone has different experiences.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiserfs#Move_away_from_ReiserFS_to_ext3
[1] He used to be a regular in gentoo-amd64, when it was still active; yes, you
know, the guy who wrote the longest emails ;) .
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs#History
-- 
Marc Joliet
--
"People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we
don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup

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