I've been using Reiserfs for a few years now on Debian (unstable and testing), and have had *no* problems with it. Until now.
I had one partition using 3.5 format. Blindly, I tried to create a .tgz of many gigabytes. It seemed to go OK until the # of bytes approached 4GB. That's when I noticed that the # of bytes in the file and the # of blocks in the file, as reported by 'ls -ls' were way out of sync. Shortly after that, my system silently rebooted. The filesystem tree was hosed and needed to be rebuilt. I backed up what I could and rebuilt the tree. Since then, the system would only hang when the file size neared 4GB; it no longer silently reboots. The problem is evident using Debian Linux kernels 2.6.15 and 2.6.12. The problem is not at all evident using 3.6 format. Having read some of the documentation, Reiserfs is limited to 2GB files. This isn't a problem. Knowing that, I can do things differently. But what troubles me is that the 3.5 filesystem and the system were 'hurt' by Reiserfs. Is/was this a known problem with 3.5? Or is it related to Debian's setup? I've solved the problem by backing up the 3.5 fs, making a new 3.6 fs and restoring. It's a moot point for me now, but others may encounter this problem. Neal
