[CentOS] Upgrade RedHat 9 to Fedora

[Bryan J. Smith]

sudo Yang <sudoyang at 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.


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