On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 08:40:50 -0500 (EST) Joshua Baker-LePain jlb17@duke.edu wrote:
*shudder* That may be so in terms of performance, but what about reliability and longevity? Given RH's treatment of non-ext3 FSs (and reiserfs's murky future in general), I'd be *very* hesitant to use reiserfs for anything.
As long as your hw is ok, reiserfs works (>=2.4.18, dont know about 2.6). When you get a noncorrected bitflip in memory, it tends to propagate down to fs and make a nonnoticeable or huge disaster, depending on where it lands. That's true for all filesystems, see: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/iron-sosp05.pdf
Solaris10 ZFS is immune to that thanks to its cheksumming.
Also, personally I've lost much more data on ext3 than on reiserfs. As people tend to say, YMMV.
It's true that right now there is no filesystem on linux I'd really prefer for such task. Ext3 doesn't cope with the load, ext4 seems to do nothing to improve that, reiser3 is here but limited in today's multicpu machines due to its BKL, reiser4 is "almost there" for at least two years now due to kernel politics, and I still hear mixed things about xfs ... Maybe veritas vxfs, which became free to use on smaller x86_64 machines? http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/sfbasic/index.jsp