On Tue, Jun 13, 2000 at 04:54:12PM +0100, James Sutherland wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Jun 2000, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> > > I've heard a couple of horror stories about RFS chewing up data. Frankly,
> > > whether it loses data or not isn't relevant at this point. You will,
> >
> > Its very relevant that a file system never loses data - it should panic the
> > box rather than do that. That one doesnt worry me for a different reason -
> > I know Hans cares a great deal about his fs actually working right.
>
> Interesting; I remember not too long ago some reference to a problem (a
> race condition somewhere, IIRC), to which the reply was "I've run a
> benchmark and that worked OK". It wasn't Hans himself who said that, but
> the comment still reflected badly on the team.
>
> Right now, there seems to be far too much effort going into "Force the
> code as it is into the kernel right now", and too little into "OK, it's
> not ready to go into 2.4.0, we need to do X, Y and Z."
That's really an interesting thing you've said James. I've been trying to
pay attention to this thread quite closely, and there has maybe been (if any)
one or two people that have stated actual problems with ReiserFS in regards
to including it in the kernel. The bulk of this thread has been personal
opinions, obscure references, etc. If you're this interested in proselyting
about the evils of (heaven forbid) another filesystem, I'm sure there's an
alt.rant.reiserfs newsgroup that would love to have this type of discussion.
Would it be possible for actual bugs in regards to including the _current_
ReiserFS code be reported here and just leave personal beliefs out of this?
This could actually be a very productive thread instead of just a big flame
war if anybody would start giving real reasons. I just don't get the
problem we're having. There is quite a bit of kernel code that is even
dubbed with the term dangerous, and I haven't seen anything that should
reasonably keep it out of the kernel any more than, say, DevFS or NTFS write.
The only negative thing I've seen is Hans getting a little unreasonable, but
I'm starting to not blame him after seeing a lot of excuses for keeping good
code that is being maintained and updated from being included because of
personal belief and not because of the merits or demerits of the FS itself.
I've recently had an experience whereas before such I might have joined on
this charade against reiserfs, but it saved the butt of a server we had. A
program that was running various jobs stored logs of the jobs in a directory
that managed to accumulate (because of an extension in the set time to
remove the old logs) 260,000 or so files in a directory. By the time we
were able to pull it off line, We could barely access this directory. It
took 9 hours to copy the files to a different location because of the vast
number of them (don't we all love linked lists :) ). We switched it over
to ReiserFS and we haven't had trouble since then. I know you can say
things like, "Well, you shouldn't have stuck that many file in a single
directory anyway" and, "Who else sticks that many files in a directory" but
the fact of the matter is, ext2 is really starting to get a bit dated on
certain concepts, and the quicker ReiserFS is shipped with the kernel, the
sooner we'll have a rock solid FS to complement the state of the art in
programming and hardware. Just my .02.
Matthew
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