Hi

Benjamin Scott wrote:

> Hello again,
>
>   As I mentioned in my message entitled "New to ReiserFS...", I have some
> questions regarding the mkreiserfs utility and the choice of hash function.
> I have Linux kernel 2.2.19, reiserfs 3.5.34, and reiserfsprogs 3.x.0j.  I am
> looking at the manual page for mkreiserfs, specifically, the "-h"  option,
> and wondering which hash function to choose.
>
>   From the mailing list archives, and some web searches, I gather that
> "rupasov" is depreciated, "r5" is a good general choice, and "tea" is the
> most robust, but carries a performance penalty.
>
>   Now, better performance is always welcome, but data integrity and
> availability is of paramount importance.  Does anyone have any opinions on
> how likely, really, a hash collision is with r5?  If you need figures, we
> are talking between 500 and 600 GB of data, with maybe ten thousand files in
> a directory, max, and file sizes ranging from 20 KB to 50 MB.
>

It is probably possible to break 'r5' and generate names having the same value
of r5. But, I do not think that it will ever fail if you do not do that
intentionally.


>
>   Also: In my web searches, I found this webpage
>
>         http://hints.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/reiserfs.txt
>
> and it made me nervous.  The phrase "lost data" will do that to me.  :)  Of
> course, that page is not a definitive source, but I am having trouble
> finding a source I could call definitive.
>
>   Basically, what I am wondering is: If the worst-case does occur, will
> ReiserFS fail the operation gracefully, or does it do something nasty, like
> eat the data or scramble the filesystem?  An "Out of space" or similar error
> message is acceptable for pathological cases, but silently corrupting data
> is a thought that gives me nightmares.  Is that webpage bogus, or is this a
> real threat?

reiserfs should not scramble filesystem when number of hash collisions reaches
its limit.
It should return -125 in 2.2 and -EBUSY in 2.4

Thanks,
vs


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