Thank you very much for your feedback so far! Kerin Millar wrote: > For this reason, and because I believe that the stability of reiserfs > was improved drastically in later revisions of the 2.4 kernel, I would > urge that you consider using a modern 2.4 kernel and the latest reiserfs > tools if possible!
I don't want to describe why we are still using such an outdated system :-) but we will move to Gentoo with a current 2.6.x kernel and reiser4 soon. I just wanted to know if this will eliminate the problem once and for all - at least in theory - because of the new concepts in reiser4 (atomic transactions). ------ Christian Mayrhuber wrote: > I'd suggest to do the following for pull the plug scenarios on productive > systems with reiserfs: > 1) Disable write caching for ide drives with "hdparm -W 0 /dev/hdX" > � �This is the most important thing to do. Will this really help to protect against partially written sectors and from there resulting read-errors (If a disk loses power while writing a sector the CRC-Check will fail and the disk reports an read-error that's not caused by a real hardware defect)? Changing the write cache strategy just "moves" the problem "in time" - maybe the propability that something happens is lower, because the amount of data that gets written at a certain point of time is smaller. > 4) If you want to prevent data corruption and not just filesystem > � �corruption, use a recent 2.6.x kernel which incoporates Chris Mason's > � �data logging patches. > � �Alternatively you could use a newer SuSE which has the data logging > � �patches in the 2.4 kernel series, too. Maybe the installation of a > � �a newer 2.4.x kernel rpm from ftp.suse.com will work for you. > As reiser4 is atomic in it's operations it should protect your data even more > than ext3/reiserfs with the data=journal mount option, unless you don't have > write cache for ide drives enabled. Reiser4 is still beta. I am not concerned about the current beta quality, we will migrate early next year and someday the bugs will be fixed. Updating a SuSE system is quite a pain I experienced (without reinstalling), it will be easier with Gentoo to keep a reasonable current system. > Since 2.6.9 the write barrier patches are in the kernel. These should > protect better from data loss with disks that have write caching enabled. > The only two filesystems supporting write barrier are ext3 with the mount > option "barrier=1" and reiserfs with the mount option "barrier=flush". Our problem is not loss of (user) data. If someone pulls the plug before all unsaved data is written or before the write cache is flushed - I don't care. But it would be nice if the system would boot again... and all system files are sane. As I understand it, reiser4 recognizes if a certain transaction was completed successfully. But will it fix a partially written sector? Bye, Bernhard
