sudo Yang sudoyang@gmail.com wrote:
We rely heavily on ReiserFS. Unfortunately, RedHat Enterprise and CentOS do not support it.
There's a reason for this and a reason why Fedora makes you run an installer-time option to enable it.
We started out with RedHat 6.x then 7.1 which does not support any journaling file system at all.
I was fairly certain that Ext3 shipped with Red Hat Linux 7, especially 7.1 which was kernel 2.4. Ext3 went into the stock kernel as of 2.4.15. Although ReiserFS went into the stock kernel as of 2.4.1, it was still missing serious features that Ext3 had.
We had to add ReiserFS support ourselves, so I guess we could do the same here.
Any reason you went ReiserFS?
Back in the kernel 2.2 era, even SuSE recommended I not deploy it, and go with VA Linux / Ext3 kernels instead. I was glad that I did -- never a hiccup (although it was full data journaling back then).
I know CentOS has an unsupported kernel that supports ReiserFS, unfortunately it's not integrated into Anaconda for automated kickstart installation. Why ReiserFS, it's more convenient and we've found it to work better with large file systems.
Actually, if you're working with large filesystems, XFS is a better solution IMHO. It has had the best feature support history of any journaling filesystem, even over Ext3 in many cases. The only issue XFS had was the lack of a lot of support code -- stuff that went in circa 2.5.3+, and is now standard in 2.6 (as well as backported to late 2.4).
I've been running XFS since Red Hat Linux 7.1.
These features are extremely useful in ReiserFS: dynamic inode creation,
XFS
negligible time to create file system of any size,
XFS
large file and filesystem support,
Oh, definitely XFS -- especially versus ReiserFS v3 at the time.
no mandatory fsck (ext3 forces you to do this once in a while, unless you remember to reset it before rebooting).
You can use "tune2fs -i 0" and "tune2fs -c -1" to turn it off, _permanently_.
When ReiserFS 4 reaches maturity, we're planning to switch to it (atomic operations, metadata journaling, ... nice :).
Did I mention XFS? ;->
XFS was ported whole from Irix, true, full UNIX filesystem design that has been unchanged since 1994. All major features were 100% compatible with Linux from day 1 -- NFS, Quotas, SELinux (when it was introduced later), etc..., as well as POSIX ACLs.
In fact, most of the general Virtual Filesystem (VFS) layer features that all filesystems benefit from (even if JFS and ReiserFS don't implement them yet) was thanx to SGI's contributions to 2.5's development.