Novell Moves Away From ReiserFS

VSquared56 writes, "Novell announced a shift in the default filesystem from ReiserFS to ext3 for users of its SuSE Enterprise Linux. This news comes shortly after Hans Reiser's arrest, though Novell says the decision was being considered long before. Though Novell will continue supporting ReiserFS 3, it claims ext3 is more stable and will 'soon' match performance with the newer ReiserFS 4. What implications will this have for SuSE users, and ReiserFS's future as a whole?"

Re:It's Deja Vu All over Again

[arth1]

I predicted this a few days ago, when I wrote here:

That it /is/ going to damage reiserfs is beyond any doubt, no matter whether he's proven innocent, not proven guilty, or proven guilty. The name is tainted, and a business executive will not likely touch anything related to that person, no matter whether it gets taken over and run by other people or not.

This was modded flamebait.

People, you might not want to hear it, and you might not agree with stupid knee-jerk reactions, but these reactions will be coming. The name "reiserfs" is tainted, whether that's rational or not.

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:It's Deja Vu All over Again

[bernywork]

Unfortunately, I hate to agree with you, but it's true. If they project renames and then it continues, it might get picked up again.

The other concern is going to be about support, if Hans is found guilty or not, it doesn't really matter. A company such as Novell may consider that the filesystem platform isn't as supported as what it once was and is moving away from it.

From a marketing point of view, Novell won't want to associated with it either. If they show support for him, and he is found guilty, it's a marketing nightmare for Novell.

arrest aside...

[Anonymous MadCoe]

It seems that ReiserFS really depends on 1 guy. For any company this is a risk. It sounds reasonable to me to stay away from products and features like that.

Is the charge worth getting rid of a product?

[Skuggi]

Come on now, just cause someones charged with murder, should that really stop the progress of technology? I can see changing the name if he's convicted, but what happened to innocent until proven guilty...

ext3 Performance Matches Reiser4?!

[RAMMS+EIN]

``ext3 is more stable and will 'soon' match performance with the newer ReiserFS 4''

Huh? In whose benchmarks? What about space usage? What about plugins for arbitrary attributes?

Re:xfs for ever

[udderly]

That's what backups are for. Seriously, with XFS you run a very real risk of zeroing out a file if the file system isn't shut down properly.

OMG, are you kidding? If it was NTFS or FAT, people on /. would be going crazy about it. It would be more famous than the BSoD.

Re:Old news

[Anonymous Coward]

This 'story' should be pulled. It is not true to say that they announced this after the arrest - therefore there is no story.

Re:Smart move, just a little late

[RAMMS+EIN]

Let me start by saying I'm not disagreeing with you, just pointing out that different people may have different experiences (AKA YMMV).

``First your average backup. Yes, I'm well aware that you can always tools like tar but really.. Its the same deal with Sun's current development ZFS: it lacks the option to decently make a backup. Yes you can use tar, but I don't consider this decent. I'm talking about tools like backup/restore (ext3) or even native "ports" like xfsdump/xfsrestore. Easy, fast and reliable. Make a whole dump (or increamental), you can then either restore the whole session or use an interactive shell to merely grab the file(s) you're after. Naturally it also supports commandline parameters. And Reiser? IIRC (correct me if I'm wrong please) its even longer around than xfs, and even xfs managed to get me something decent for making backups...''

I believe backup tools that depend on the specifics of filesystems are a bad idea.

When you go looking for filesystem-independent backup tools, I'm sure you'll find plenty (the recent thread here on Slashdot may be a good starting point). I myself keep most of my data in Subversion repositories and databases; backups are made through the appropriate backup tools. Whatever is left on the filesystem is synchronized between a couple of computers using rsync.

``The good part is its speed, the way it caches and writes data in such a way where it tries to store things in one specific part makes it faster. I can't comment if reiser really is faster than others, I never noticed it.''

In the tests I ran, it wiped the floor with ext2 and (OpenBSD) ffs, especially when extracting lots of small files. I have no idea how it compares to more modern filesystems like XFS, ZFS, etc.

``But the bad part is also that if you have a crash on your hands (just turn of your computer right now. No, not a shutdown but keep the powerbutton pressed untill it goes "poof") and reboot chances are very high that you just lost valuable data.''

Although I have lost files on ReiserFS partitions, I've lost way more on ext2 and (especially) HFS+ partitions.

``The theory behind journaling should give you some protection against this, and normally it does, but its my experience that whenever something like this happened on a box which was using reiser I lost just too many files. Several files in /etc used to become corrupt, binaries started going haywire and the worst part: because the index wasn't affected it was quite hard to detect these bad files.''

Often when files seem to be missing after a crash, fsck has been able to recover them for me. This goes for ext2, reiserfs, ffs, and hfs+. Reiserfs is the only one of these on which I have never gotten the filesystem so broken it couldn't be fixed anymore.

In case people are wondering where I get my data from: I work with a lot of old hardware which sometimes fails, laptops that run out of battery or are dropped on the floor, accidentally unplugged power cables, and the occasional unclean shutdown.

Ending submissions with an idiotic question

[Gothmolly]

Editors, if you're the ones doing it, please stop. If submitters are doing it, please edit their submissions. We don't need this Roland Piquipaille/Ric Romero style of foolishness, i.e. "Blah blah has happened to company FOO, what do you all think?" Posting it for discussion on Slashdot IMPLIES you're going to get a million different viewpoints, none of which are really important to the submitter. You'll get the viewpoints anyway, you don't need to "prompt" us for them.

Re:xfs for ever

[Rob Kaper]

What good is a UPS going to do in the case the machine powers off because of a problem with the power unit, a motherboard short circuit, and so on? Any filesystem with serious data loss on a power failure is not acceptable, period.

Re:Thins aren't looking up for Hans.

[Gothmolly]

Nothing to do with reiserfs, but that is a stunningly crappy article. Nina "kicked him out" ? What sort of language is that? Also, weird non sequiturs in the article make it difficult to determine what was imporant and what wasn't - "also included was a receipt for a syphon pump". Maybe he had a snickers bar wrapper in his pocket too? Ooooh!

Lastly, this just shows how you SHOULDNT buy stuff on credit cards or ATM cards, they pulled his records and found what books he bought.

Re:xfs for ever

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly right. Reiser-bots (or any filesystem zealots) should remember this: EXT2/3 are virtually bullet-proof. They are used in a HUGE numbner of systems and have been tested over and over and over again in a vast array of hardware and conditions.

EXT3 works. Some filesystems do niche tasks better (very large systems, for example, might be better with GFS)... but EXT3 is a workhorse. It does well in all conditions and for general purpose use it is unbeatable. If you don't know what you are doing, do not listen to zealots. Stick with the distro default -- which is EXT3/

ext3 to match ReiserFS 4?

[GrievousMistake]

That does seem a little unlikely. Isn't ext3 still basically ext2 with journaling? How are they still making such progress with it that performance will soon match a modern filesystem like Reiser4, which among other things has a more optimized disk layout and will have transparent compression? If there are patches to bring those to ext3, they're neither stable nor ext2 compatible, which are supposed to be ext3's advantage.
(Meh. Upon RTFA'ing I see what they meant was that ext3 will "soon" match the performance of ReiserFS (3), and that it is still more stable than Reiser4. The summary still deserves the rant, and I'm actually curious about how they are improving performance in ext3 nowadays, so I'm still posting this.)

Re:bummer of a downgrade

[joto]

So exchanging reiserfs for ext3 is a downgrade now? With ext3 you get a stable well-maintained file-system used by the majority of linux users worldwide. With reiserfs you get a poorly maintained file-system, which the original creator has dropped to work on something else, and that nobody else maintains, and that instead of trying to do well as a file-system focuses on performance for other random things, such as being a database, having small files, etc... Maybe you find it sad, I call it common sense!

Re:xfs for ever

[RevDobbs]

OMG, he's not kidding.

And... so what? It is a "high performance" file system, not a safe file system. Use it for application cacheing, tmp space, or something else where file integrity after a reboot does not matter. It is just a tool, another option when using your unix-like computer.

Re:xfs for ever

[MightyYar]

Any filesystem with serious data loss on a power failure is not acceptable, period.

That may be true in your application, but some might be willing to take that risk in exchange for performance.

Re:xfs for ever

[ArbitraryConstant]

"Any filesystem with serious data loss on a power failure is not acceptable, period."

I seriously doubt that I would care if my squid proxy box lost the filesystem with the cache on it.

It is entirely application-dependant.

Re:Hurm

[philwx]

Well, they had to make up a question (no matter how vague) to get this article on slashdot.

Re:Let this be a lesson to you all

[bcat24]

Umm, whatever ever happened to innocent until proven guilty? I agree there may be a good chance Reiser did it, but I think there's also reasonable doubt he didn't.

MPU

[Ignignot]

I'm tired of this crap. I have a feeling that editors just feel that they have to add something to submissions, so they add in "what do yall think???" at the end.

Re:It's Deja Vu All over Again

[kimvette]

What would happen if (god forbid) Linus were in Reiser's place? Would everyone here be distancing themselves from using Linux? Would Novell, IBM, etc. abandon the use of Linux, throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

This is why when the story hit I posed legitimate questions regarding the filesystem's future (and got flamed for it, BTW, here and on linuxquestions); a person's career work should be viewed independently of his or her personal misdeeds. Otherwise, we should abandon electricity and incandescent lights (Edison was a bit of a bastard, and his invention of the electric chair "tainted" AC), jets (Heinkel was a nazi), Mercury and Apollo programs should never have happened (Wernher von Braun, the brain behind those programs, was a nazi, willing or otherwise). There are many, many worthwhile inventions proposed, designed, and/or implemented by evil people, and yet we use them on a daily basis, because regardless of the creators' nature, philosophy, or misdeeds, they have produced some worthwhile things that abandoning them because of the heritage would be somewhere between silly and irresponsible.

Re:Just rename it

[Killjoy_NL]

Thinking of the children is not a bad thing here.
I also hope she isn't dead and that his name is cleared, but if he did it, I hope they find evidence and that they convict him.
I'm not ruling out any possibilities.

Rubbish

[segedunum]

Ext3, in contrast, is stable and likely will match ReiserFS's performance advantages "soon."

Rubbish. Ext3 has never been able to match Reiser's performance on small files or in other areas, and the notion that ext3 is going to match it is absurd. Even ext4 is not likely to catch up. A lot of ext developers have bizarre ideas about how their filesystem compares to Reiser, XFS or even JFS in a lot of areas. Ext is simply a stable and solid, but badly evolved, filesystem and it is a filesystem that generates an awful lot of disk activity.

Not just the name...

[LinuxGeek]

I've been to the namesys [namesys.com] website and haven't found anything about the Hans Reiser arrest. If it is more than a one man show, then they should have a prominent statement about their intention to continue development regardless of the outcome. Not seeing something to that effect after this mych time would make me quite nervous if I had a business or product that relied on continued development of the ReiserFS line. Seems as if Namesys is accepting the inevitable demise of the whole organization at this point; I hope that changes.

Re:xfs for ever

[finiteSet]

One time a rm -r in the wrong terminal erased nearly a month's worth of work. Obviously, entirely my fault (one several levels). Because I almost universally use ReiserFS, I was tremendously releived to find several stories of successful file recoveries (such as this one [antrix.net]). Unfortunately, I soon realized I had used ext3 for this particular partition...

Q: How can I recover (undelete) deleted files from my ext3 partition?

Actually, you can't! This is what one of the developers, Andreas Dilger, said about it: In order to ensure that ext3 can safely resume an unlink after a crash, it actually zeros out the block pointers in the inode, whereas ext2 just marks these blocks as unused in the block bitmaps and marks the inode as "deleted" and leaves the block pointers alone. Your only hope is to "grep" for parts of your files that have been deleted and hope for the best.

Though I have a much better backup system now, I still avoid ext3 at all costs. As careful as I try to be, I know I'll slip up again sometime.

Re:Smart move, just a little late

[segedunum]

Its the same deal with Sun's current development ZFS: it lacks the option to decently make a backup. Yes you can use tar, but I don't consider this decent. I'm talking about tools like backup/restore (ext3) or even native "ports" like xfsdump/xfsrestore.

What? That's why you have LVM and snapshots. Am I missing something here? Backup features in the filesystem is generally a bad idea.

The good part is its speed, the way it caches and writes data in such a way where it tries to store things in one specific part makes it faster. I can't comment if reiser really is faster than others, I never noticed it.

Reiser totally wipes the floor with ext filesystems on just about any workload, especially on small files. Imagine a scenario where you have a fileserver that serves lots of Word documents etc. to people. Suse's customers sure are going to notice the difference. XFS blows ext away on large files, and don't run VMware files on an ext partition.

But the bad part is also that if you have a crash on your hands (just turn of your computer right now. No, not a shutdown but keep the powerbutton pressed untill it goes "poof")

I saw ludicrous posts like this many a time on Gentoo's forums. No filesystem will guarantee to save you from this.

But in that same environment where I sometimes had to endure a powerloss I noticed that the frequency in which my data became corrupt was far and far less than with reiser.

On XFS? I doubt it. It is recommended you use a UPS with XFS filesystems.

Re:xfs for ever

[udderly]

So, let me get this straight, a "high-performance" file system is one that screws up your files. And somebody actually modded that "insightful."

From wikipedia: "Fanboys" remain loyal to their particular obsession, disregarding any factors that differ from their point of view. They are also typically hateful the opposing brand of their obession regardless of its merits or achievements.

Sound like the guy in the mirror?

Re:xfs for ever

[udderly]

I know that this is going to sound ass-kissy, but that has to be one of the best posts I have seen on /.

Very informative with none of the "you're a dumbass because you don't know this" kind of crap typical on /.. Also, well organized, very readable and generally grammatical. Bravo!