A number of people in the forums have agreed that the warning against ReiserFS is unnecessary and counter-productive. Please remove said warning from the install guide, as the kernel developers have stated ReiserFS to be production-ready. This warning has scared many people away from ReiserFS. Please remove it. See http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=7907 for more information.
That warning was put in after watching a constant stream of rather alarming bugfixes go in for a suposidly "stable" filesystem in the 2.4.0-2.4.10 days and after getting multiple reports from users about filesystem corruption. Of course I'm not impartial on this matter as I lost a partition to reiserfsck when it segfaulted during a --rebuild-tree a couple months ago. The warning was put there to protect users and I've yet to see any declaration from any well known and trusted kernel developers not involved with reiserfs that they would trust it with their own data and their employers data. If you have such a post from linus, cox, viro, please let us know :) The warning should stay... in fact I think XFS should join it... The only FS I trust these days for serious work is ext3 and thats what I use on webservers, database machines, etc. Recommend WONTFIX.
I agree. I am updating the install guide, and have heard the same horror stories about reiserfs. Unless I am told so by drobbins (or any other for that matter), this is a no go. //ZhEN
If not warning removal for ReiserFS, how about a warning addition for XFS? A lot of people have used that as an alternative (specifically because of that warning) and have had data loss as a result. From that thread alone: xming wrote: I just had a maasive file corruption with xfs, so I booted from install cd, did a xfs_recover, mounted the fs and copied all the files I need (incl. the /usr/protage/distfiles), I am downloading the 1.3b stage 1 in windows and I am switching back to reiser. XFS cannot be trusted with preemtive patch, after recover it didn't put the things in the right place, everything landed in /lost+found. My /boot was also XFS, but it is still intact, strange. So here ends my adventure with xfs, xming beware with XFS --- end post --- Wel I am back now, kde is running, and resiserfs is much faster on ths laptop. Anyway I had less prblems with reiser (using it more then 1 year) than xfs (1 month). For all of you using xfs, TURN OFF preemptive in your kernel, recompile and reboot. -- end post -- ste wrote: I have a big crash with my root partition in XFS : I use the xfs kernel (no other patch), on a duron 800, with a nearly full XFS 4Gb partition. After a crash, a bad corruption has occured and every time I tried to use the /etc directory, it crash again without any message. I tried fsck.xfs, then, I understood with the so funy fsck.xfs manpage it wasn't the best way to fix the problem. So, i used the helpless xfs_repair, which endend with a fatal error : [lots of stuff] I haven't any vital data in it, but if you have any idea, please tell me before I reinstall my system (reiserfs this time). I used reiserfs for a year without any problem, and i was planing to go back to it even before the crash. My XFS only last one month. Please, if you love XFS, continue to use it, even if it doesn't worked with me, it can work for you perfectly. I don't want to affraid anyone. but I also think the ReiserFS warning in the install doc is not fair, it had been the only reason I was using XFS. Ste --- end post --- In any case, a new install guide for 1.4 is being prepared, so I (and others) would appreciate any change in the warnings soon. Perhaps ReiserFS isn't production-ready, so that warning may be warranted -- however, XFS has demonstrated far more data loss recently than ReiserFS.
While I never had any problems with XFS and file system corruption I can't imagine it being as "safe" as ext2 or ext3.... And with the major "lots of small files" performance increases I have seen with the ext3-htree patch in gentoo-sources-r9..... Any -core opinions?
I'm now back on reiserfs myself, and I've heard Daniel recommend it to people, so I don't know if a specific warning is still necessary. Perhaps something along the lines of "For rock-solid stability and security Gentoo recommends that new users choose ext3. Reiserfs, XFS, and JFS are all much newer filesystems, and therefore they _may_ be more prone to breakage, but your mileage may vary."
Yeah, i agree with you Grant, would be the perfect statement! I'm using Reiser on over 20 machines (friends, school, server), and they all work perfectly.. Your statement doesn't bash any filesystem, yet gives a slight hint about them :o) I like it! :)
