On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, Federico Sevilla III wrote:
..
> About ReiserFS: last I heard a lot of ReiserFS upgrades require you to
> wipe out your data and reformat (or something like that), can anyone
> confirm or contradict this?
That's generally the case when you upgrade to a radically different
OS. You can't convert a FAT partition to NTFS either, but you can convert
it to FAT32, which is just a bastardized extended FAT.
> Aside from the benefits recovering from a crash, what else does a
> journalling file system offer? Is it any faster? Or OTOH is it a little
> slower? :)
ReiserFS does NOT use the traditional indirect block addressing scheme, it
uses spanning trees for metadata storage. This is a whole different
approach to filesystem design (I believe it started as Hans Reiser's PhD
research).
What that practically means is that in pathological cases involving
gazillions of tiny files (e.g. proxy and news servers) ReiserFS can be
ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE faster than ext2. It only has deficiencies when you
have a few very large files -- trunc() on ReiserFS is slower, so if you do
a lot of trunc()'s you will see a performance loss.
But for something like storing Oracle data files (a few large
files) ReiserFS is preferred by me. Why? the journaling ensures that a
COMMIT operation (which requires a sync() to the filesystem) will return
much faster than on ext2. Plus the uptime is improved significantly. Ever
tried to fsck an 18GB partition? that's peanuts where Oracle is concerned,
and being freed of the need to fsck will really increase your crash
recovery time.
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