Re: Installing Fedora Core with root on Reiserfs

2005-07-20 Thread Russell Coker
On Thursday 21 July 2005 10:04, Edward Shishkin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> My phrase "reiserfs.ko located on reiserfs" sounds bad, and I should
> clarify that the reiserfs.ko is contained in the initrd with other
> binaries/scripts, and this initrd looks fine from the standpoint of
> kernel/reiserfs, but not from the standpoint of grub/reiserfs-emulation.
> The logs obtained from serial console don't include anything about
> loading initrd, and there is the following detail: a dump created by
> debugreiserfs -d shows that the initrd (i_size: 1128235) is represented
> by an indirect item (276 4K-blocks), while grub found that this is not
> sector-aligned:

Might this be related to the size of the ReiserFS file system?

I tested installs with the default partitioning (100M /boot) which worked OK.  
When you had the problem were you using a larger ReiserFS file system?

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Re: Installing Fedora Core with root on Reiserfs

2005-07-19 Thread Russell Coker
On Tuesday 19 July 2005 01:59, Jeff Mahoney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >> If the root file system is reiserfs then reiserfs.ko will (or at least
> >> should) be included in the initrd.
> >
> > Right, but initrd is in /boot which is not something separate: it is on
> > the same reiserfs root partition..
>
> The situation you're describing is one that is well tested by now.
>
> If the root filesystem is reiserfs, and /boot is a part of it,
> reiserfs.ko MUST be in the initrd. Otherwise, there is a chicken/egg
> problem and the system will not boot.

This works in all my tests.  The reiserfs.ko module is apparently in the 
initrd.

Also if the original bug concerned a lack of reiserfs.ko in the initrd then 
re-running GRUB would not fix things.

I can't reproduce the bug, it just works for me.

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Re: Installing Fedora Core with root on Reiserfs

2005-07-18 Thread Russell Coker
On Monday 18 July 2005 06:01, Edward Shishkin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> FC4-test3 (and perhaps FC4) installs its own version of grub which seems
> to interact incorrectly with reiserfs. The problem is that reiserfs.ko
> module located on reiserfs partition can not be loaded.

Firstly there is no situation in which reiserfs.ko will be loaded from a 
reiserfs partition.

If the root file system is reiserfs then reiserfs.ko will (or at least should) 
be included in the initrd.  The GRUB support for ReiserFS is based on the 
file /boot/grub/reiserfs_stage1_5 which is only needed for /boot on ReiserFS.

Some people believe that /boot should be a separate file system to the root 
file system regardless of all other issues.  All systems which use LVM for 
the root file system on Fedora (the default partitioning involves LVM) will 
have a separate /boot file system because GRUB apparently doesn't support LVM 
(yet).

So having a /boot with Ext2/3 is an easy solution to any ReiserFS booting 
issues, and a solution that will be forced on the users if they use LVM.  
When using a small /boot file system ReiserFS is not a good choice.  A quick 
test showed that Ext3 gave 18M more usable disk space from a 100M file system 
than ReiserFS, this will essentially force all LVM users to use Ext3 
for /boot.

> 1. (Requires some partition formatted by ext2).
>At the end of installation process (after invitation to reboot) boot
> from some rescue CD, mount reiserfs root partition (say to /mnt) and move
> all the compressed images (vmlinuz-xxx and initrd-xxx located at /mnt/boot)
> to your ext2 partition. Then edit the file /mnt/boot/grub/grub.conf
> pointing a new location for the images. Reboot and finish the
> installation
>process.

This can be done automatically through the Anaconda GUI or through kickstart.  
Just specify that /boot is to be a separate partition of type Ext3.

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Re: Write-once file system

2003-06-27 Thread Russell Coker
On Sat, 28 Jun 2003 03:09, Jason Holt wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Jun 2003, Fong Vang wrote:
> > I don't think turning the write option off during write is a good idea. 
> > All file systems running reiserfs should make the file write-once.  File
> > systems that do need to be rewriteable will use ext3 or something else
> > (that's how we do it now anyway).
> >
> > Could it done in such a way that even root can't write (not even when
> > using block devices)?
>
> [...]
>
> The trick is that root controls the kernel, and the kernel talks directly
> to the hardware.  That's all a block device is - (mostly) direct hardware
> access.
>
> So what you're asking for is something beyond root's control that can tell
> him "no" when he asks to write to an immutable file.

Another option is to use a security system such as SE Linux to limit the 
access given to the root account.

In SE Linux a daemon running as root generally has very little access to the 
system, and a UID=0 user who is in the user_t domain gets less access than a 
non-root user on a non-SE system.

Go to my SE Linux web page (below) and read about my "play machine".

SE Linux works well on ReiserFS.  I don't use ReiserFS on my play machine 
however because it can only boot from Ext2, Ext3, or XFS.

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Re: xattr

2003-06-19 Thread Russell Coker
On Fri, 20 Jun 2003 00:55, Chris Mason wrote:
> > So the longest value I've used is 38 bytes.
>
> Then data=journal mode will do what you want.  You'll get atomic writes
> up to 4k.  If you really don't want data=journal for the rest of the FS,
> we can make an option for using data logging on xattr files only.  Jeff
> and I had wanted to avoid the complication but it is at least possible.

OK.  Initially just using data=journal should be fine, and even for 
wide-spread use, forcing everyone to use data=journal shouldn't be too much 
of a hardship - although I'm sure that some people will prefer to journal 
only the xattr's.

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Re: xattr

2003-06-19 Thread Russell Coker
On the topic of atomic xattr operations on ReiserFS as needed for the new 
LSM/SE Linux operations.

On Thu, 19 Jun 2003 23:52, Chris Mason wrote:
> How big are the xattrs you have in mind?  We can get atomic writes of 4k
> in length but beyond that things get more difficult.

Most of them will be less than 80 bytes.  They are currently of the form:
user-name:object_r:type

The user-name is the Unix account name which usually isn't much more than 8 
bytes.  The "type" is usually less than 15 bytes (the longest I've used so 
far is 20 bytes).

So the longest value I've used is 38 bytes.

Also they can't be chosen arbitarily by the user.  The user gets some small 
control over the type within a range of types that the administrator permits.
If the administrator permits overly long type names and has to deal with 
non-atomicity as a result then it's their issue.

If you can guarantee atomic operations on 160 byte operations (twice what I 
expect anyone to use) then it'll be fine.

> As for the xattr and the create in the same transaction, that's a little
> harder.  We'd probably need a new syscall, or to change the semantics of
> the xattr call such that creating an xattr on a file that doesn't exist
> also creates the file.

Creating a file by creating the xattr sounds like a bad idea as you can't 
control the Unix permissions of the file.  This isn't much of a big deal with 
SE Linux as the security type determines who can access the file.  But for 
other uses it may be a serious problem.

I agree that we need a new syscall and other people had the same idea before 
either of us.

Maybe ReiserFS could be used as the first implementation of this proposed new 
syscall...

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xattr

2003-06-16 Thread Russell Coker
What is the status of xattr support in 2.5.x?

How is journalling of xattr's being handled?

For correct operation of SE Linux we need to have the xattr that is used for 
the security context be changed atomically, and if a file is created and 
immediately has the xattr set then ideally we would have the file creation 
and the xattr creation in the same journal entry.

Is this possible?  If doing this requires that the file system be mounted with 
data=journal then this will be fine.

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another IDE-DISK issue in 2.4.21-rc3

2003-05-30 Thread Russell Coker
I have finally installed 2.4.21-rc3.  I compiled the base IDE driver into the 
kernel but make the ide-disk driver a module (to save RAM on machines without 
IDE hardware).

Following is a selection from the kernel message log.  As you can see I get 
some nasty and worrying error messages when the kernel tries to access 
/dev/hda before the ide-disk module is loaded.

If this is not a known bug then let me know so I can send it to linux-kernel.

ReiserFS seems to be working fine in 2.4.21-rc3.

Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00beta3-.2.4
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
PIIX4: IDE controller at PCI slot 00:07.1
PIIX4: chipset revision 1
PIIX4: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide0: BM-DMA at 0x1c10-0x1c17, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio
ide1: BM-DMA at 0x1c18-0x1c1f, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:pio
hda: IC25N030ATCS04-0, ATA DISK drive
blk: queue c02a8680, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0x)
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
Partition check:
 hda:end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda), sector 0
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda), sector 2
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda), sector 4
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda), sector 6
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda), sector 0
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda), sector 2
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda), sector 4
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda), sector 6
 unable to read partition table
[boring stuff removed]
hda: attached ide-disk driver.
hda: host protected area => 1
hda: 58605120 sectors (30006 MB) w/1768KiB Cache, CHS=3876/240/63, UDMA(33)
 /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 p2 p4 < p5 p6 p7 p8 >

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Re: Multiple data streams...

2003-04-02 Thread Russell Coker
On Wed, 2 Apr 2003 19:28, Anders Widman wrote:
>Is this supported, or will it be supported by ReiserFS?
>I  use  this  feature quite quite much.. Maybe this is something to
>add to ReiserFS?
>
>There is very brief info at Microsoft's website:

Does MS support multiple data streams properly yet?

The last information I read about data streams indicated that commonly used 
operations (such as typing "copy" in a command-line session) would not work 
properly with multiple data streams.  Also many important programs such as 
anti-virus programs did not support it.

The Linux API does not support multiple data streams.  Support for extended 
attributes has recently been added, this will do most things that you might 
want to do with multiple streams and does it in a standard way that is 
supported.

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Re: International Web Services/XML Conference & Expo -July 28-30, 2003, Toronto, Canada

2003-03-29 Thread Russell Coker
On Sat, 29 Mar 2003 03:57, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> I'd like to report this to the sender's ISP, but can't find the Received:
> header from when it entered Namesys. Where is it?

The ReiserFS list has always munged email so you can't report spam.

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Re: filesystem corruption ?

2003-03-21 Thread Russell Coker
On Fri, 21 Mar 2003 14:07, Oleg Drokin wrote:
> I've learn in the school that if you put some bit amount of plumbum in

It's better known in English as "lead".

The problem with lead is that it's poisonous and soft.  Having to wash your 
hands after touching your computer could get annoying.

Other metals such as copper and steel will reduce the radiation and can also 
be used for protection against mechanical damage.

The best way to reduce radiation is by distance.  The inverse-square law 
applies, so moving the computer further away from the experiment will reduce 
the radiation more easily than anything else you may do.  One thing to 
consider is disk-less X-term machines for if you need to operate a computer 
from near the experiment, so if the X-term crashed from radiation then your 
server with the data should continue running correctly.

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Re: Corrupted/unreadable journal: reiser vs. ext3

2003-02-12 Thread Russell Coker
On Wed, 12 Feb 2003 16:26, Anders Widman wrote:
> >> Unplanned downtime do cause lot of harm to any business.
> >
> > It's better to stop when there's a serious error than to blindly continue
> > and make things worse.
>
> I  (and  I  think  no  one  else)  never  said  continue blindly. Most
> users/workstations do not have RAID and probably never will.

Hard drive costs are constantly decreasing while the value of data is 
constantly increasing.  I think that the use of RAID will increase steadily.

> The  others  want to make Linux a viable option for "normal" users and
> want Linux to be able to replace Windows or Mac OS. The only way I see
> that happen is if Linux starts to get more userfriendly and safe.

I guess you're not familiar with what NT does then.

NT 3.5x would sometimes get confused about it's data and umount the file 
system in question to avoid the risk of damaging data.

In case of a serious kernel error NT will give a BSOD in situations where 
Linux by default will print an Oops message and continue running.

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Re: OT: Swapfile to RAM relation with 2.4.2X+

2003-02-07 Thread Russell Coker
On Fri, 7 Feb 2003 02:47, Manuel Krause wrote:
> In the beginning of 2.4.0+ a relation of swapfile-to-RAM of 2-to-1 was
> recommended. Due to my several system changes to come in those times I

Such recommendations are only generalisations.  Ignore them and look at what 
your system is doing.  If your swap space never runs out and you don't expect 
your usage patterns to require more (including cron jobs and periods of 
unexpected load) then you have enough.  If you run out of swap space then you 
need more, also you should have some swap even if you have a lot of memory.  
There's always data that isn't used much and can be paged out to make room 
for more disk cache.


BTW  Anything that is worth saying in a .sig can be said in 4 lines.

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Re: kernel go-slow

2003-02-06 Thread Russell Coker
On Thu, 6 Feb 2003 17:32, Alexander Lyamin wrote:
> > > One problem that has started occuring is that periodically some of the
> > > machines will go really slow for a while.  It's as if the CPU speed has
> > > just dropped to 1% of it's regular speed.  Then after 10 minutes or so
> > > it will continue as normal.
> >
> > when its slows down, please check with vmstat for IO or with your
>
> i think i wasnt clear enough.
> so - first , if you "go-slow" on a disk activity, chances are good
> that it caused by FS or VM or their misunderstandings.

vmstat doesn't work properly.  CPU time is 99% system which suggests that one 
CPU is spending all it's time in kernel space (for both threads of a 
hyper-threaded CPU) or that both CPUs have each got one thread locked in 
kernel space.

It's not disk related, those machines don't have a huge disk access.  The 
machines with the serious disk activity don't have any problems.

> but there is possible situations that will not generate disk activity,
> but may cause your system to "go-slow", if there you have some
> unussual IO numbers while disk activity is moderate to low -
> most likely same sweet pair.

The problem is that sar etc product jumbled results.  Profiling the kernel may 
help, but may also hide the error, and it's not something I can easily do.

The servers are locked in a managed server room on the other side of the city 
so seeing the blinken lights is not an option.

I've put the aa1 kernel on half the machines and now I'll wait to see what 
happens.  If the aa1 machines don't have the problem but the others do then 
I'll go all aa1.

> > > Interestingly the machines that have the problems are not the most
> > > active in the file system (mail store), but the mail spool machines. 
> > > The mail spool machines do a good amount of file access (but well below
> > > the limits of the hardware) and also use more memory and have large
> > > load spikes on occasion (virus and spam scanning).
>
> talking about  virus/spam scanning - what do you use and how its integrated
> in your SMTP MTA ?

RAV.  I'm not sure of the details, I think it runs as a daemon that qmail 
talks to.  I try to avoid the anti-virus stuff.

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kernel go-slow

2003-02-02 Thread Russell Coker
I'm running a number of machines with 2.4.20 and the ReiserFS journal patches.

One problem that has started occuring is that periodically some of the 
machines will go really slow for a while.  It's as if the CPU speed has just 
dropped to 1% of it's regular speed.  Then after 10 minutes or so it will 
continue as normal.

Has anyone heard of such things before?

I am asking here first because the ReiserFS patch is the most significant 
kernel patch I've applied on what is otherwise a stock 2.4.20 kernel.

Interestingly the machines that have the problems are not the most active in 
the file system (mail store), but the mail spool machines.  The mail spool 
machines do a good amount of file access (but well below the limits of the 
hardware) and also use more memory and have large load spikes on occasion 
(virus and spam scanning).

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kswapd CPU usage and heavy disk IO

2003-01-09 Thread Russell Coker
I have a server with 4G of RAM running ReiserFS for everything that matters.

It has 2G of swap space free, but so far I have not seen swap usage go above 
1.6M (so in normal use I could turn off swap entirely and expect not to see 
much difference).

When it's under really heavy load (when I have a maintenance task involving a 
"find /" and there are lots of POP/IMAP clients hitting the server as well as 
mail delivery) and the load average gets to about 40, the "kswapd" kernel 
thread starts using excessive CPU time.  It will stay on ~4% but have spikes 
of up to 45%!!!  This is a two-processor machine so 45% CPU reported by top 
means 90% of a single CPU I guess.  90% of a 1.8GHz P4 CPU is a lot of CPU 
and I think that something is wrong.

In the meager documentation in the kernel source kswapd is described as being 
involved in paging to disk.  I don't think that this is what it is doing as 
there is no noticable paging activity (it generally has at least 600M of 
"buffers" so there is no real shortage of memory).

Would the activity of kswapd be involved with ReiserFS in any way?  What can I 
do to improve this situation?

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Re: !?!

2003-01-07 Thread Russell Coker
On Wed, 8 Jan 2003 07:53, Anton Erofeevskij wrote:
> in reiserfs filesystem
> time cat sd1 | ./a.out > sd2
> 0.00user 0.05system 0:01.79elapsed 2%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
> 0inputs+0outputs (131major+43minor)pagefaults 0swaps
>
> in ext2 filesystem
> time cat sd1 | ./a.out > sd2
> 0.00user 0.05system 0:00.95elapsed 2%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
> 0inputs+0outputs (131major+43minor)pagefaults 0swaps

Try mounting the ReiserFS file system with notail and it should perform a lot 
better for such things.

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Re: what do you do that stresses your filesystem?

2002-12-23 Thread Russell Coker
On Mon, 23 Dec 2002 16:56, Ross Vandegrift wrote:
> On machines with Linux md RAID arrays that need to be remirrored,
> I do end up waiting a bit (10-30 seconds) due to read starvation, but
> this problem is so much better than it used to be it's hardly worth
> mentioning.

One thing I've done before is configure the boot scripts to set the RAID 
re-sync speed very low before fsck/mount time and then set it back later.  It 
didn't seem to do as much good as I thought it would though.

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/proc/mounts and data=journal

2002-12-19 Thread Russell Coker
I've applied the patches for mounting with data=journal.  However one problem 
that I have discovered is that the data=journal status of a file system is 
not shown in /proc/mounts, other tunable options of a file system such as 
noatime are shown.

I think that this is a bug.

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non volatile ram devices

2002-12-04 Thread Russell Coker
I have some servers that are giving inadequate disk performance for Maildir 
mail spools.  They are running kernel 2.4.19 (2.4.20 upgrade is planned) and 
using ReiserFS for everything that's important.

At this stage it is impossible for me to replace disks, RAID controllers, or 
anything else really significant.

What I am thinking of doing is using a kernel that supports data journalling 
which should increase performance, but still probably won't give me enough.  
So I am thinking of using an "external journal" (or using software RAID to 
put the part of the partition containing the journal on a different device).

The device containing the journal would be something much faster than physical 
media.  I have been doing some research on non-volatile memory devices.  I 
only found one company producing disks that are RAM based with battery 
backup, and they seem to start at $10K (too expensive - probably because they 
are much larger than I need, I need 128M at most, they provide 2G).  I found 
many companies selling flash memory, but that only takes a million writes 
(that'll last about an hour for the use I plan).  I found one company selling 
PC-Card devices that have two batterys for backup, but that requires getting 
a PCI controller for PC-Card's (something I haven't tried before).

Does anyone know of an affordable ($1000 or less) device that can survive 
unexpected power outages of at least 24 hours duration, can commit a write in 
less than 1ms, supports unlimited writes, and connects to a IDE or SCSI bus 
(or PCI if there's a suitable Linux driver).

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Re: other OS

2002-12-03 Thread Russell Coker
On Tue, 3 Dec 2002 05:11, darren wrote:
> Was just wondering about the possibilities of using reiserfs on my
> Solaris 6 machine.
>
> Any chance of that?

I doubt it.  I can't imagine Sun (or anyone else) paying Hans enough money to 
do this.

Veritas VXFS is good for this type of thing.  Any time you want half decent IO 
performance on Solaris you want Veritas VXFS and Volume Manager.

> I am having problems with FS performance (large number, 20K of small
> files in folder with constant writes and deletes) on the Sun Machine and
> was thinking if this can help me.
>
> The only way I know is to use a Linux machine running reiser and NFS it
> over. But performance will surely be degraded this wayany other
> suggestions?

In 1999 I was doing some work on AIX machines.  I found that an AIX server was 
so slow that NFS mounting a ReiserFS file system over a 10baseT network was 
faster for some operations!!!  If you do a usenet search you can find 
references to this, comp.sys.aix or something.

Another option is to use Linux on the SPARC machine.  Linux on SPARC reputedly 
performs a lot better than Solaris if you have 8 or less CPUs, even without 
the ReiserFS issue.  I think that Linux on SPARC can even run Solaris 
binaries (but I'm not certain).


PS  There is no such thing as Solaris 6.  They jumped straight from Solaris 
2.6 (which is presumably what you are using) to Solaris 7.0.

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2.4.20 and data logging

2002-12-03 Thread Russell Coker
How is data logging work going?  Is there a patch for 2.4.20?

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[reiserfs-list] back up to disk

2002-10-15 Thread Russell Coker

Here's an interesting article I just read.  It's just a device with a bunch of 
ATA drives inside, up to 2T of storage.  Probably anyone here could produce 
something based on ReiserFS to compete with it...


Storage start-up Avamar Technologies is launching an appliance 
this week that it claims backs up network data more quickly and 
less expensively than tape. 
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2002/1014avamar.html?net

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Re: [reiserfs-list] Reiserfs with Samba vs NetApp Filer

2002-10-15 Thread Russell Coker

On Tue, 15 Oct 2002 15:42, Hans Reiser wrote:
> Russell Coker wrote:
> >See the following graph:
> >http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/hardware/46g.png
> >
> >This shows testing a single 46G drive, two drives on different buses at
> > the same time, and two drives on the same bus at the same time.  zcav
> > (part of Bonnie++) was used to perform the tests.
>
> I am surprised that separating them onto different buses has so little
> effect.  It looks like most of the bottleneck for large reads off two
> drives is not the IDE bus, but something else (maybe CPU or memory
> bandwidth).

I was surprised too.  Especially as it's an ATA-66 bus (the bus was expected 
to be a bottleneck).

Only a single CPU.

I would like to do more research on this matter and write a magazine article 
(I already have a magazine wanting to publish it).  All I need is suitable 
access to the latest hardware to perform my tests (tests on old hardware 
while still being interesting research doesn't sell magazines).

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[reiserfs-list] This list is good for spammers.

2002-06-23 Thread Russell Coker

There has been a huge amount of spam coming through this list recently.  
Could the list master please take the following actions:

1)  Make the list server software not strip all headers so we can see how the 
messages get to the list server?  Then we could report spam to SpamCop, and 
people with good filtering software could filter on the first IP address in 
the list.

2)  Make the list partially moderated.  Suggestion, moderate any message from 
someone who is not subscribed, and any message from an IP address that's in 
the common DNSBL's.  This will not deny anyone access to the list and will 
not take a huge amount of effort (once the few people like myself who 
subscribe with one address and post with another get with it).


Doing such things doesn't seem to be difficult, everyone else is doing it.

Another more invasive action is to make the list server use some of the DNSBL 
services to reject postings altogether.  It will slightly inconveniance some 
legit users, but will really cut down on spam.

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Re: [reiserfs-list] fsync() Performance Issue

2002-04-29 Thread Russell Coker

On Fri, 26 Apr 2002 22:28, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

It's interesting to note your email address and what it implies...

>   I'm wondering if anyone out there may have some suggestions on how
> to improve the performance of a system employing fsync(). I have to be able
> to guaranty that every write to my fileserver is on disk when the client
> has passed it to the server. Therefore, I have disabled write cache on the
> disk and issue an fsync() per file. I'm running 2.4.19-pre7, reiserfs
> 3.6.25, without additional patches. I have seen some discussions out here
> about various other "speed-up" patches and am wondering if I need to add
> these to 2.4.19-pre7? And what they are and where can I obtain said
> patches? Also, I'm wondering if there is another solution to syncing the
> data that is faster than fsync(). Testing, thusfar, has shown a large
> disparity between running with and without sync.Another idea is to explore
> another filesystem, but I'm not exactly excited by the other journaling
> filesystems out there at this time. All ideas will be greatly appreciated.

These issues have been discussed a few times, but not with any results as 
exciting as you might hope for.  One which was mentioned was using 
fdatasync() instead of fsync().

One thing that has occurred to me (which has not been previously discussed as 
far as I recall) is the possibility for using sync() instead of fsync() if 
you can accumulate a number of files (and therefore replace many fsync()'s 
with one sync() ).

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Re: [reiserfs-list] Encryption plugin developer needed for reiser4

2002-03-12 Thread Russell Coker

On Tue, 12 Mar 2002 19:43, Sam Vilain wrote:
> > I've done some benchmarking of the old "international kernel patch" and
> > found it to be usable on small systems.
>
> Done it recently?
>
> hoffman:~$ df . crypto/
> Filesystem   1k-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda7  6265120   5366380898740  86% /home
> /home/sam/.crypto   665572498796166776  75% /home/sam/crypto
> hoffman:~$ time bash -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=4096 count=10240;
> sync"
> 10240+0 records in
> 10240+0 records out
>
> real0m5.152s
> user0m0.050s
> sys 0m0.640s
> hoffman:~$ time bash -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=crypto/test bs=4096
> count=10240; sync"
> 10240+0 records in
> 10240+0 records out
>
> real0m9.685s
> user0m0.030s
> sys 0m0.660s
> hoffman:~$

So we're doing 40M in <10s, this means something like 12MB/s encryption 
speed.

> That's with AES, a 192 bit key size, and a 2.4.18-ac3+preempt kernel.  My
> machine is a fairly new Dell(850MHz).  Both filesystems are reiserfs.
>
> During a fsck, the CPU isn't doing much else anyway.  So it would take
> about twice as long, assuming you don't have a system more powerful than
> my laptop to do the encryption.  Say you had a dual processor system (or a
> single Athlon ;), it could probably encrypt/decrypt as quickly as the disk
> can transfer data, especially for random access.

If a fast Athlon is twice as fast then it'll still be a bottleneck if you 
have a single fast IDE hard drive (modern IDE drives can sustain >30M/s for 
linear transfers).

Then think if you have 10 large file systems each comprised of 6 disks in a 
hardware RAID array.  You'll never get enough CPU power to keep up.

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Re: [reiserfs-list] O/T but expert answer needed: MS says NTFS does full data journaling

2002-02-14 Thread Russell Coker

On Thu, 14 Feb 2002 20:25, Paul Robertson wrote:
> > When a maching gets an Oops or BSOD condition then the kernel is
>
> inherantly
>
> > doing improper and unpredictable things with memory.  Therefore
> > regardless
>
> of
>
> > what file system you use it could get trashed and data could get lost.
> >
> > Oops conditions are generally rare on Linux machines so this shouldn't be
> > much of an issue.  BSOD on NT is quite common...
>
> IMO oops and BSOD are quite different. There are many possible reasons why
> an NT kernel component might decide to call KeBugCheck() which generates
> the BSOD. I have a book which lists around 100 "common" bugcheck codes. In
> particular, NT can be configured to dump the system state to a file on the
> boot partition when a crash occurs.

There are also a couple of Linux kernel patches to support dumping the memory 
to the swap partition on an Oops, and an Oops can be triggered by any 
condition that some kernel code considers Oops-worthy.

IMHO The biggest difference between an Oops and a BSOD is that a machine 
doesn't totally die after an Oops (which can be considered a good or a bad 
thing).

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Re: [reiserfs-list] O/T but expert answer needed: MS says NTFS does full data journaling

2002-02-13 Thread Russell Coker

On Thu, 14 Feb 2002 02:58, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Feb 2002 12:26:59 +1300, Adam Warner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  
said:
> >Does Windows journal the metadata, data or both?
> >
> >Answer:  Windows NT/2000 systems that utilize NTFS since NT3.1 have
> >always journalled and logged metadata and data, so we've been doing
> >this for close to a decade.
> >
> > I just want to confirm if this is in fact true. I can't find a
>
> Hint:  If they journal both, why do you ever hear of people getting
> corrupted filesystems when the box BSOD's?
>
> (No, I don't know if it does or not - but I've heard *too* many people say
> "It hosed the disk and I had to reinstall" for me to think that it's done
> correctly)

When a maching gets an Oops or BSOD condition then the kernel is inherantly 
doing improper and unpredictable things with memory.  Therefore regardless of 
what file system you use it could get trashed and data could get lost.

Oops conditions are generally rare on Linux machines so this shouldn't be 
much of an issue.  BSOD on NT is quite common...

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Re: [reiserfs-list] Can ReiserFS handle removable storage?

2002-01-20 Thread Russell Coker

On Mon, 21 Jan 2002 07:28, Oleg Drokin wrote:
> > USB by it's nature is something external to the system.  Unplugging a USB
> > cable with a mounted drive attached should (IMHO) get the same result as
> > unplugging an Ethernet cable with an NFS mount in progress.  This means
> > processes go into D state if they have outstanding writes, and for reads
> > they may go D state depending on mount options, and then you wait for the
> > device to become available again.
>
> How do you distinguish between SCSI & USB storage in Linux on fs level? ;)

You can have SCSI and IDE unpluggable devices too...

> > For a file system on USB ReiserFS would have to recheck the superblock
> > (to make sure that it hasn't been mounted on another computer in the mean
> > time) before allowing access again.  Also there would have to be a
> > recovery process for the situation when the USB device is gone for good.
>
> Sound not very easy to do ;)

True.  Writing a good file system is never easy.

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[reiserfs-list] transient hard drive error causing problems

2002-01-16 Thread Russell Coker

Below is the relevant portion of my dmesg output.  I get a status error on my 
first hard drive (it's a transient thing after a hard reset).

There are a few issues here:
The dmesg output does not tell me which partition the error refers to!  I can 
presume that it's related to the error on hda, but as hda has parts of 
several RAID devices even that doesn't narrow it down much.

Can the /proc/reiserfs stuff be used to track this down?

Also there's the usual issue of messages having codes "vs-number", is there a 
reference to what the numbers mean?

hda: status error: status=0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest }
hda: drive not ready for command
is_tree_node: node level 759 does not match to the expected one 2
vs-5150: search_by_key: invalid format found in block 16618. Fsck?
vs-13070: reiserfs_read_inode2: i/o failure occurred trying to find stat data 
of [13396 11199 0x0 SD]
hdb: ATAPI 40X DVD-ROM drive, 512kB Cache, UDMA(33)
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12
is_tree_node: node level 759 does not match to the expected one 2
vs-5150: search_by_key: invalid format found in block 16618. Fsck?
vs-13070: reiserfs_read_inode2: i/o failure occurred trying to find stat data 
of [13721 31689 0x0 SD]
is_tree_node: node level 759 does not match to the expected one 2
vs-5150: search_by_key: invalid format found in block 16618. Fsck?
vs-13070: reiserfs_read_inode2: i/o failure occurred trying to find stat data 
of [13396 14810 0x0 SD]

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Re: [reiserfs-list] Journal Questions

2002-01-07 Thread Russell Coker

On Mon, 7 Jan 2002 13:11, pesarif wrote:
> 1. How big is the journal?

32M.  It is possible to change this, but currently that requires recompiling 
your kernel (and running an altered mkreiserfs).  Then a regular kernel won't 
mount them.  It's painful enough that you don't want to do it.

Hans has announced plans to address this issue, I am looking forward to a 
version of ReiserFS that works on floppies.  ;)

> I have just made (today :)) a 600MB reiser 3.6
> partition in Mandrake 8.0 and the usuable space reported by df -h, was
> 596MB. Isn't the journal 32MB because on my other system with a 5GB reiser
> 3.6 parition, 32MB is "missing" in df -h.  And also, will the journal be
> larger with a larger filesystem?

The journal is always the same size.  As for the 600MB partition, are you 
certain that the partition was really 600M?  Or did you just tell your fdisk 
program to make it 600M?  Fdisk will always round up the sizes to the nearest 
"cylinder" and the difference can be 30M or more...

> 2. How do I disable journal replay and save/restore the journal or delete
> it completely?

You can't.

Ext3 has this functionality because it's an addition to Ext2 which doesn't 
have it.  So you can switch between ext3 and ext2 by mounting it with a 
different driver.  Also the journal is a file on ext3 so changing it's size 
is less invasive.

We've all been hanging out for this for a long time.  Unfortunately Hans has 
had other things to work on, no sponsor has demanded it, and no volunteer has 
come forward to do it.

Maybe Hans will comment on where it is in the current schedule...



PS  It's an interesting co-incidence that we get two new users on the list 
from bigpond in the same week who both use Kmail 1.3...

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Re: [reiserfs-list] When will Reiserfs be ready?

2002-01-07 Thread Russell Coker

On Mon, 7 Jan 2002 12:42, _nasturtium wrote:
> > All of the blathering and silliness removed.  Short version: Russell
> > made a few comments to explain some stuff on the assumption that
> > Nasturtium was actually asking honest questions.  Nasturtium made a
> > number of ad hominem attacks.  Blah blah blah.
>
> You have not actually addressed my reply, merely "blather" on. My main
> point was that someone on the MandrakeSoft QA team notes that you cannot
> write to NTFS5 partitions and that was what I posted. If someone, even one
> who has been on list for years, wants to doubt it I will reply with
> "proof".

That is wrong.

>From your original message on the topic of NTFS:
> DON'T swap to NTFS because Linux support is read-only.

No reference is made to any particular version of NTFS or of Windows.  No 
other qualifiying statement is made, you clearly and directly stated that 
NTFS was not writable on Linux.

Stop trying to claim you were only referring to Windows XP, you said nothing 
of the kind in your original message.

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Re: [reiserfs-list] When will Reiserfs be ready?

2002-01-07 Thread Russell Coker

On Mon, 7 Jan 2002 15:14, Andre Pang wrote:
> Some people need to run Windows to run various applications.
> It has many apps available which Linux does not; accept it.  If

Absolutely.

In this case if you are doing sales then you MUST have MS software.

There are enough hassles in applying for a job without using MS software.  I 
simply refuse to send my CV in any format other than HTML.  Any recruiting 
agent who can't work out how to make MS-Word import HTML or to make IE load 
it isn't qualified to read my CV or to represent me.  I've had a few 
arguements about this issue with recruiting agents.

> > > I suggest that it's best of Hans uses the default options for every
> > > other program he uses so that he can concentrate his energies on
> > > ReiserFS (but I'm sure he's already doing that).
>
> Then why are you suggesting that Hans uses Explore2fs and
> reiser4win on WinNT?  They're certainly not defaults.

You misread the quoting.  That's something I wrote.

> > > Support for writing to NTFS has been working for several years.  I was
> > > doing it in 1999.  There are issues about it, and the code is still
> > > marked experimental, but it works.
>
> [Russell: where "it works" meaning "usually works but may bugger
>  up your filesystem badly ;)]

Yes, they always had warnings about that.  So I just made some good backups 
and gave it a go.  I never lost any data (and what I was doing was simple 
enough that there was no chance of losing data and not realising it).  But I 
admit that I didn't overly stress it.  Anyway in that case I wouldn't have 
minded saying "oops I trashed that NT machine and lost the CD - I'll have to 
make it Linux-only".  ;)

Warnings don't generally bother me too much.  I try things out on a test 
machine first anyway.  If something labeled as "experimental and dangerous" 
passes my tests and works then I'll use it before something labeled as 
"stable and released" that I haven't tested.

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Re: [reiserfs-list] magic is useless & Determining File Types

2002-01-07 Thread Russell Coker

On Mon, 7 Jan 2002 10:49, Hans Reiser wrote:
> >There is an issue of going completly overboard,
> >"attribute/subattribute/subsubattribute" anybody? This is certainly an
> >overall interesting idea. How about "file//acl" for accessing ACLs? This
> >does mean though you *MUST* have a filesystem specific dump tool.
>
> Yep, we have to improve tar.

Also we must not break the tar file format!!!

Please keep in mind my previous messages on this list regarding LHArc and 
OS/2's EAs when thinking of changes to tar.

The big advantage of tar is that it's files can be read on any OS so no 
matter how much hardware and software I lose then I can still find a way to 
read my tar files!

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Re: [reiserfs-list] When will Reiserfs be ready?

2002-01-07 Thread Russell Coker

On Mon, 7 Jan 2002 12:15, _nasturtium wrote:
> > > I was reading the FAQ on www.namesys.com and it seems Reiser4 is
> > > sponsored (but not endorsed by...) by DARPA (Defence Advanced Research
> > > Projects Agency?). That seems like a good source of funds compared to
> > > your support business - your Support page only claims one
> > > request/payment every few days.
> >
> > You should try running a business when you grow up.  Then you will
> > discover the perilous position that having only a single customer can
> > place you in.
>
> Looks like my post was a bit incomplete - Reiser is also sponsored by SuSE
> (formerly mp3.com), ApplianceWare and BigStorage Inc. You can verify it by
> going to www.reiserfs.com. Having 4 probably contracted sponsors is a good
> way to have a business. Read "The Code Book" (Simon Singh) or any good
> history book and you will find that the Enigma cipher machine was bought
> almost totally by the German military.  Scherbius, the inventor, made a LOT
> of money.

One example does not prove the generic case.

For every inventor who makes a lot of money there are at least 100 who don't. 
Most new businesses don't last 2 years, most small businesses don't last 10 
years.  If you run a business and want it to last you have to have 
contingency plans and backups.  Tieing everything to one source of income is 
very dangerous for a small business, especially if what you are doing is not 
a core business area for your customer.  ReiserFS isn't important enough for 
the US government to take such a risk.

Also Hans just mentioned that Applianceware went out of business, surely that 
demonstrates how it is better to have multiple sources of income.

> There is only one use of the user-pays support every few day - someone
> commented it was because there are hardly any errors.  If questions can be
> answered on this list, why would anyone pay??!! Hans Reiser is too helpful
> on this list - if he didn't answer namesys would make a lot more money.

So now you're saying that Hans is too helpful for his own good and that he 
should cease providing free help?

> What do you mean by when you grow up? Perhaps you should resit the German
> history test - if you're even a freshman.

What is the relevance of German history to ReiserFS discussion?

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Re: [reiserfs-list] magic is useless & Determining File Types

2002-01-07 Thread Russell Coker

On Mon, 7 Jan 2002 15:12, Hans Reiser wrote:
> >I'm quite familiar with the hardware that Russell talks about (I've
> >had to debug more than one borked CCW chain in my life ;).  Although
> >*conceptually* an indexed file is a directory, the IBM mainframe
> >channel does some things that take the performance to another level.
> >For starters, the disk is in 'count key data' (CKD) form - each disk
> >block can be different lengths, and part of the block be a 'key'
> >field.
>
> Is this really significant to performance?  The cost of a seek is so
> large compared to a partial block transfer

However if you have a limited number of channels to transfer data (even 
mainframes have limits - usually imposed by the budget at purchase time) then 
you will not want to needlessly saturate them and require new hardware 
purchases.

Currently with most PC-class systems (including rack-mount servers and almost 
all Linux machines) things are different, you can buy plenty of storage 
cheaply (even Ultra2 SCSI is cheap compared to mainframe attachments), but 
then again you get limited by motherboard IO bandwidth.  The fact that most 
users of PC-type systems (myself included) never see enough system load to 
make this a problem is not relevant when you are considering what to do to 
get really serious performance.

Currently if you want really serious FS performance on PC-type systems then 
you just give up and get a NetApp device or similar.  ReiserFS is only one 
part of the solution to this problem, and the other parts aren't really there 
yet.

> >3) For added fun, IBM systems like to keep track of 'cylinder track
> >block' information for the data, since a file may have different-sized
> >physical blocks, often formatted to fit exactly 3 to the track or
> >similar. This became an issue for some places for Y2K conversions - if
> >your data file fit exactly 3 to the track, and you had to find 6 more
> >bytes, you had to overflow, fitting only 2 to the track with a lot of
> >wasted space, and needing 50% more disk space.  And if you used a hash
> >function to compute the cyl/track/block of a file entry, you were in
> >trouble
>
> disk geometry is usually not worth knowing and lied about by the hard
> drive.

I suspect that this is usually the case on mainframes too.  Valdis?

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Re: [reiserfs-list] When will Reiserfs be ready?

2002-01-07 Thread Russell Coker

On Mon, 7 Jan 2002 11:48, _nasturtium wrote:
> > > > What has happened to NTFS performance?  During the Windows NT 3.5
> > > > days it was the slowest FS in production use, particularly for small
> > > > files. Has this changed?  (Should I go from FAT32 to NTFS on my
> > > > laptop windows partition?  Fear of performance loss has kept me from
> > > > doing so.)
> > >
> > >   For an architect of a filesystem, you aren't giving it much support.
> >
> > You are very intent on parading your stupidity in this list.
>
> This list is (hopefully) to share knowledge and solve problems, not to try
> and insult people.

You've changed your mind rapidly on this issue.

> > > What are you doing having a FAT32 partition??!!!
> >
> > Running Windows as he clearly states in his message.  While we might
> > debate the issue of whether he should be running Windows or whether he
> > should use Star Office or other software when dealing with people who use
> > Word documents, we can't debate the suitability of FAT32 for Windows.
>
> Have a minimal FAT32 partition, then run reiser4win as discussed by Gerson
> Kurz, Yves Glodz and friends. Then you can run windows (for what
> purpose??!!) and develop reiser simultaneously.

Which was not what you suggested before.

Also it wouldn't work anyway as Linux file systems are well integrated into 
the kernel buffering (this is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on 
your opinion).  So porting work from Windows to Linux would involve adding a 
lot of new buffering code and testing it.  I suspect that porting from Linux 
to Windows would be easier (porting from Linux to OS/2 would definately be 
easier than porting from OS/2 to Linux - and I suspect that Windows still has 
some similarities with OS/2 in this regard).

> > > Although if you
> > > must use windows, DON'T swap to NTFS because Linux support is
> > > read-only.
> >
> > Support for writing to NTFS has been working for several years.  I was
> > doing it in 1999.  There are issues about it, and the code is still
> > marked experimental, but it works.
>
> Hmmmwhy not join the Linux-Mandrake Newbie list at
> www.mandrakesoft.com? You might learn a fair bit - "civileme"
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] who is, or at least was on the Mandrake QA team
> comments on the "Help! WinXP" thread (4/1/02, 22:20) that:
>
> "But FYI the XP NTFS is different from the NTFS5 W2k NTFS which is
> different from previous NTFS setups.  We can read and experimentally
> write NTFS for winNT4, but not NTFS5 for Win2k nor the WinXP version of
> NTFS.  Microsoft has made the format a trade secret."
>
> The important part is you CANNOT read/write for Win2k NTFS...if you want to
> call him an idiot go ahead...join the list, I'm on it - that post was in
> reply to one of my mails...

You initially said that NTFS support in Linux is read-only.  Now you say that 
Windows XP NTFS support is read-only, which is totally different.

I said that Linux has support for writing NTFS and that I had used such 
support in 1999 (long before the release of Windows XP).

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Re: [reiserfs-list] When will Reiserfs be ready?

2002-01-04 Thread Russell Coker

On Fri, 4 Jan 2002 11:14, _nasturtium wrote:
> I was reading the FAQ on www.namesys.com and it seems Reiser4 is sponsored
> (but not endorsed by...) by DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects
> Agency?). That seems like a good source of funds compared to your support
> business - your Support page only claims one request/payment every few
> days.

You should try running a business when you grow up.  Then you will discover 
the perilous position that having only a single customer can place you in.

> Does the name of Jeremy Fitzhardinge come to mind? While I recognise that
> most developers are paid, the aforementioned happens to be "Volunteer.
> Author of hashing code. (teahash.c)". Surely the open source model would
> allow more contributors.

The model is open.  The code is all released under the GPL and anyone who 
wishes can write new features or fix bugs.  The reason why almost everyone 
who writes ReiserFS code works for Hans is that he appears to make a job 
offer to anyone who writes some ReiserFS code.  Quite some time ago Chris 
Mason appeared from no-where, started contributing patches for ReiserFS, 
wrote the journalling code and got hired by Hans.

There is always the option of forking ReiserFS if enough intelligent people 
believe that Hans is doing the wrong thing.  So far there have been 
discussions about a number of issues, but the consensus of opinion among 
people who matter is that Hans is doing a reasonably good job.

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Re: [reiserfs-list] magic is useless & Determining File Types

2002-01-04 Thread Russell Coker

On Fri, 4 Jan 2002 01:15, Alexander G. M. Smith wrote:
> Same thing for BeOS - floppies are FAT16 format (you can format for
> BFS but with the journal etc, there's 300KB of space for data),
> there's also FAT32 for Windows disk partitions and several other
> file systems.  Some, like Mac HFS support a limited number of
> attributes (just the ones which have a Mac equivalent).  Still,
> they got used by most of the regular applications written for BeOS,
> even if just used to specify the file type.  Though if you used POSIX
> commands (like "cp"), the attributes would get lost.  ZIP format

If even "cp" doesn't support it then it's useless.  This is why multiple 
streams were useless on NT because the cmd.exe "copy" command didn't support 
them (presumably nothing has changed with XP).

> So, if it's available and useful then there's a good chance people
> will use it in new software.

When even the authors of the OS don't support it in their core file copy 
utility then it's not getting used much.

On Fri, 4 Jan 2002 01:48, Jens Benecke wrote:
> Microsoft has these problems with their NTFS attributes. All the office
> type apps and so on were pressed hard to make heavy use of these
> attributes: you can e.g. view author, etc. of a MS-Word file in the file
> properties dialog, or the download URL of a .zip file, just like OS/2 did
> in 1996 :) but apart from that, nobody is really using these features,
> because you still *CAN* install Windows on FAT partitions and there you
> don't have these features.

OS/2 had extended attributes in 1988.  OS/2 had a fully object-oriented 
desktop using EAs in every imaginable way in 1992.  By 1996 OS/2 was 
seriously losing market-share, mind-share, and IBM support.

On Fri, 4 Jan 2002 09:48, Raphael Bosshard wrote:
> The idea of putting the filetype (ie. as MIME) into an additional
> file-attribute is not new and has done before by various systems,
> including OS/2, BeOS and even Windows. But in these cases, limitations
> of the FAT-Filesystem prevented an adoption of this feature.
> In the Unix-enviroment, it would fail because of standards and laziness;
> most of the file manipulating tools would have to be rewritten or to be
> patched. Right?
>
> Well, at least it was a nice idea... ;)

I'm not sure it was such a nice idea really.  Mainframes and mini-computers 
had typed files before Unix was invented.  Unix was one of the earlier OSs to 
use strictly non-typed files (a file is just a collection of bytes).  CP/M, 
DOS, etc all just followed that example.

If we're going to experiment with new things, then how about indexed files 
managed by the file system which allow "hardware" devices such as EMC 
machines to do the database operations.  This is why an IBM zSystem running 
OS/390 will beat almost anything for bulk IO while the same zSystem running 
Linux will apparently give poor IO performance.

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Re: [reiserfs-list] XDSM and ReiserFS

2001-12-20 Thread Russell Coker

On Wed, 19 Dec 2001 23:56, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > OK, so shopper.com has an LTO tape drive for only U$2800, and cartridges
> > for U$95 for a 100GB tape ($.95/GB).  It also has 80GB IDE drives for
> > $139 ($1.73/GB), and 160GB drives for U$289 ($1.80/GB).  Choosing the
> > 80GB drive for comparison, I would need to store about 3.6TB before the
> > tape drive became more cost-effective (not including the cost associated
> > with having 44 hard drives on-line all the time, but also not counting
> > the high up-front cost of having the tape drive and tape robot).
>
> Don't forget the number of IDE drives you can attach per interface,
> and the number of controller slots in your machine. This changes the
> numbers somewha. Do you *HAVE* enough controller slots to attach 44
> IDE hard drives? Maybe I'm out of it, but the IDE in my Dell has 2
> buses, and only a primary/secondary driver per bus.  The drives per
> controller ratio gets a lot better with SCSI - but then you get to
> re-calculate your break-even point because SCSI tends to cost more.

There are quite a few companies selling IDE controllers that have 4 IDE 
busses or more.  These provide as much ability to control hard drives as you 
can manage given the 45cm length limitation of IDE cables.

To control any decent amount of drives you need some sort of NAS type device 
doing either NFS or some sort of network block device.  Last time I looked 
into NAS type devices everyone said that they were just about to release new 
ones based around IDE (I haven't checked on whether they have done so).  Also 
there's the option of rolling your own with standard PC hardware.

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[reiserfs-list] Re: XDSM and ReiserFS

2001-12-20 Thread Russell Coker

On Thu, 20 Dec 2001 02:41, you wrote:
> > DLT and other magnetic tape are a much better option than DVD.
> > DLT drives storing 15G on a tape are common I believe.
> > Increasing the capacity of tape is much easier than increasing
> > the capacity of disks (you can always make bigger reels and
> > longer tape).
>
> The DLT8000 is a 40/80 Gig drive and the SuperDLT I beleive is
> somewhere around the 200Gig area.

Obviously I've been out of touch with the progress in DLT of recent times.

200G makes it usable IFF it's affordable...

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Re: [reiserfs-list] funny file permission after reiserfsck

2001-12-13 Thread Russell Coker

On Thu, 13 Dec 2001 04:15, W. Wilson Ho wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>   After I've run reiserfsck on my disk, I have a file with 0 permission:
>
> # ls -l
> 0-   1 root root  238 Dec 11 22:52 lk
>
> This file is not readable.  Adding "rw" permission to it does not
> make it readable again:
>
> # chmod a+rw lk
> # ls -l
> 0rw-rw-rw-   1 root root  238 Dec 11 22:52 lk
> # cat lk
> #

>From filemode.c as referenced by ls on my system, here's the list of prefix 
characters.  No '0' character.

/* Return a character indicating the type of file described by
   file mode BITS:
   'd' for directories
   'b' for block special files
   'c' for character special files
   'm' for multiplexor files
   'M' for an off-line (regular) file
   'l' for symbolic links
   's' for sockets
   'p' for fifos
   '-' for regular files
   '?' for any other file type.  */

What distribution do you use?  From my reading of the ls source I don't think 
it's possible to cause a leading '0' on Debian (of course I could have missed 
something, that source is painful to read).

What happens when you run "stat lk"?

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[reiserfs-list] per-char IO tests

2001-12-09 Thread Russell Coker

I have released a new experimental version of Bonnie++ that includes a 
program to test per-char IO using putc()/getc(), putc()/getc() when linked in 
a non-threaded way (significantly improves performance) 
putc_unlocked()/getc_unlocked(), and write()/read().

Here's the results of testing my Thinkpad T20 with P3-650:

Version  1.93  write   read putcNT getcNT   putc   getc  putcU  getcU
lyta 142651   8189   9348   1763   1813  22174  44887
lyta,142,651,8189,9348,1763,1813,22174,44887

Here's the results of testing my Athlon 800 play machine:

Version  1.93  write   read putcNT getcNT   putc   getc  putcU  getcU
test 146607   7356   7280   1834   1971  41995  59100
test,146,607,7356,7280,1834,1971,41995,59100

Both machines run ReiserFS.  A quick test indicates that using Ext2 instead 
of ReiserFS triples the  performance of write(fd, buf, 1), but this is 
something I already knew (and had mentioned before on the ReiserFS list).

Also based on previous tests I expect Solaris to outperform Linux with glibc 
on putcNT, getcNT, putc, and getc.  The regular performance of putc() on 
Solaris comes close to putc_unlocked() on Linux with glibc.




I'd like to thank Andrew Morton for forwarding messages from L-K that 
provoked me to write this new test program.

I was tempted to subscribe to L-K to join this discussion, but it seems that 
Linus is saying everything that needs to be said anyway so there's no point. 
;)

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Re: [reiserfs-list] Problem in upgrading kernel 2.4.9->2.4.13, something with reiserfs?

2001-10-30 Thread Russell Coker

On Mon, 29 Oct 2001 16:46, Petri J. Riipinen wrote:
> I'm not sure where else to ask this, but I thought that it might have
> something  to do with reiserfs, so I decided to bother you guys because I
> guess that I would find the best experts on this mailing list...;)
>
> The problem is this: I upgraded my kernel source from 2.4.9 to 2.4.13
> and  got some problems with fsck.ext2.
>
> I have one IDE hard disk divided as follows:
> /dev/hda1 -> ext2, mounted to /boot
> /dev/hda2 -> swap
> /dev/hda3 -> reiserfs, mounted to /

Sounds like you enabled devfs without installing devfsd first.

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Re: [reiserfs-list] Linux 2.4.10 + reiserfs + raid

2001-10-09 Thread Russell Coker

On Tue, 9 Oct 2001 07:32, Clement wrote:
> I just set up a box with RH 7.1, updated with Linux Kernel 2.4.10, compiled
> with reiserfs and raid support.
>
> I can define RAID-1 partitions and 'mkreiserfs /dev/md0' and mount/umount
> the partition with no trouble at all.  However, once I reboot the machine,
> the raid partitions are not readable any more!!!

What do you mean by "not readable"?  Is ReiserFS unable to mount or is the 
RAID device not created?  What does "cat /proc/mdstat" say?

ReiserFS on RAID-1 on 2.4.10 is working perfectly for me (I have raidstart 
run from an initrd).

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Re: [reiserfs-list] pull vs. push: remind me why?

2001-09-08 Thread Russell Coker

On Fri, 7 Sep 2001 19:29, Hans Reiser wrote:
> I remember that pull is generally favored over push for things like copying
> and synchronizing data over networks, but I completely forget why as it has
> been a few years.  Anyone care to remind me?

When doing pull you just setup a server and let people pull or not pull at 
their choice.  When someone wants to change how often they get the data, or 
if they want an immidiate resync to recover from a problem they won't bother 
you.

With push they will keep bothering you about changing schedules etc all the 
time, and when they change IP addresses or turn machines off they won't tell 
you and you will only know about it from repeated connect errors in syslog.

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Re: [reiserfs-list] /etc/magic

2001-07-16 Thread Russell Coker

On Mon, 16 Jul 2001 18:07, Nikita Danilov wrote:
> Russell Coker writes:
>  > On Mon, 16 Jul 2001 17:39, Nikita Danilov wrote:
>  > >  > Also here is an entry for swap files:
>  > >  > 0xff6   string  SWAP-SPACE Version 0 Swap file for 4K pages
>  > >
>  > > By the way, I just found that my perfectly valid reiserfs file-system
>  > > triggers above check. It was created on what was earlier swap device
>  > > and mkreiserfs didn't clear first 16 blocks, so put this line after
>  > > ones for reiserfs in your magic file.
>  >
>  > This has been an issue here before.  I think that on a rw mount ReiserFS
>  > should over-write that.
>  >
>  > Has the bug in mkreiserfs been fixed so it can't happen in future?
>
> mkreiserfs leaves first 16 blocks untouched for boot-loaders' sake.
> It's not a bug, it's a feature.

Which boot loader needs so much space?

This boot loader thing apparently isn't a problem for ext2...

Is there a boot loader that depends on having "SWAP-SPACE" or "SWAPSPACE2" at 
offset 0xff6?  If not then we could have special-case code which removes the 
swap signature without making a boot loader unworkable...

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Re: [reiserfs-list] /etc/magic

2001-07-16 Thread Russell Coker

On Mon, 16 Jul 2001 17:39, Nikita Danilov wrote:
>  > Also here is an entry for swap files:
>  > 0xff6   string  SWAP-SPACE Version 0 Swap file for 4K pages
>
> By the way, I just found that my perfectly valid reiserfs file-system
> triggers above check. It was created on what was earlier swap device and
> mkreiserfs didn't clear first 16 blocks, so put this line after ones for
> reiserfs in your magic file.

This has been an issue here before.  I think that on a rw mount ReiserFS 
should over-write that.

Has the bug in mkreiserfs been fixed so it can't happen in future?

>Vanilla /usr/lib/magic contains (from file-3.27-37)
>
># Linux swap file, from Daniel Quinlan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>4086    string          SWAP-SPACE      Linux/i386 swap file

Right, I didn't notice that.  I'll amend my bug report.

Here is what I am now using:
0xff6   string  SWAP-SPACE Linux/i386 swap file version 0 (4K pages)
 
0xff6   string  SWAPSPACE2 Linux/i386 swap file version
>0x400  longx %d (4K pages)
>0x404  longx size %d pages

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Re: [reiserfs-list] /etc/magic

2001-07-16 Thread Russell Coker

>  > What do you think of the following?
>
> s/short/leshort/
> s/long/lelong/

Thanks for the suggestion guys.  I have submitted a bug report to the Debian 
BTS.

Could someone please submit bug reports for Red Hat etc?  I presume that Suse 
is getting this right.  ;)

0x10034  string  ReIsErFs ReiserFS V3.5
0x10034  string  ReIsEr2Fs ReiserFS V3.6
>0x1002c leshort x block size %d
>0x10032 leshort &2 (mounted or unclean)
>0x1 lelong  x num blocks %d
>0x10040 lelong  =1 tea hash
>0x10040 lelong  =2 yura hash
>0x10040 lelong  =3 r5 hash

Also here is an entry for swap files:
0xff6   string  SWAP-SPACE Version 0 Swap file for 4K pages
 
0xff6   string  SWAPSPACE2 Version
>0x400  longx %d Swap file for 4K pages
>0x404  longx size %d pages

Here's one for compressed RAM file systems:
0   lelong0x28cd3d45  Linux Compressed ROM File System, little endian
0   belong0x28cd3d45  Linux Compressed ROM File System, big endian

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Re: [reiserfs-list] /etc/magic

2001-07-16 Thread Russell Coker

What do you think of the following?

0x10034  string ReIsErFs ReiserFS V3.5
0x10034  string ReIsEr2Fs ReiserFS V3.6
>0x1002c short  x block size %d
>0x10032 short  &2 (mounted or unclean)
>0x1 long   x num blocks %d
>0x10040 long   =1 tea hash
>0x10040 long   =2 yura hash
>0x10040 long   =3 r5 hash

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Re: [reiserfs-list] /etc/magic

2001-07-16 Thread Russell Coker

On Mon, 16 Jul 2001 15:56, Nikita Danilov wrote:
> Russell Coker writes:
>  > Could someone please write up some /etc/magic entries for reiserfs?
>  >
>  > I think it should be something like:
>  > 0x10034 string ReIsErFs Old Reiserfs
>  > 0x10034 string ReIsEr2Fs New Reiserfs
>  >
>  > But that doesn't work for some reason...
>
> Take source distribution of file, increase HOWMANY in file.h (at least
> to 0x10050), recompile and it'll work.
>
> Stock file(1) only looks at the 16384 first bytes of the file.

Thanks for that!

> By the way, are you considering sending your magic entry to the
> directory maintainer? If so, can you reword it to "ReiserFS v3.5" and
> "ReiserFS v3.6" otherwise we'll end with miserable "Newest Reiserfs"
> etc.

Sure.  I wrote that quickly after spending an hour fiddling with /etc/magic 
trying to get it to work!

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Re: [reiserfs-list] Re: benchmarks

2001-07-16 Thread Russell Coker

On Mon, 16 Jul 2001 13:00, Nikita Danilov wrote:
>  > > > On Sun, Jul 15, 2001 at 02:01:09PM +0400, Hans Reiser wrote:
>  > > >
>  > > > Making the server stateless is wrong
>  > > >
>  > > > why?
>  > >
>  > > Because it leads to all the problems we have seen!  Why not have the
>  > > client have an open file handle (the way Samba works and the way the
>  > > Unix file system API works)?  Then when the server goes down the
>  > > client sends a request to open the file again...
>
> If you have 1 clients each opening 100 files you got 1e6 opened
> files on the server---it wouldn't work. NFS was designed to be stateless
> to be scalable.

If you want performance from a file server that is almost bearable then you 
must have enough cache to handle all the open files.

10^6 files will not be workable anyway.  If each file is accessed once per 
hour then the load might almost be bearable by high-end hardware.

Memory is getting cheaper all the time.  I've worked with many server 
machines that have 2G or more of RAM.  Having enough kernel memory for 1M 
open files should be easy enough to manage (I could probably manage it on my 
laptop if I upgraded it).

Being able to actually do anything with 1M processes accessing files at the 
same time is another issue.

I am surprised to hear about NFS being stateless for large performance.  I 
always thought that it was stateless because it pre-dates the common 
availability of UPSs and hardware RAID (or any RAID really).  Also NFS 
pre-dates the availability of HACMP, E10K, and other systems to bring 
mainframe features of hot-swap hardware and high reliability to Unix systems.

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[reiserfs-list] /etc/magic

2001-07-16 Thread Russell Coker

Could someone please write up some /etc/magic entries for reiserfs?

I think it should be something like:
0x10034 string ReIsErFs Old Reiserfs
0x10034 string ReIsEr2Fs New Reiserfs

But that doesn't work for some reason...

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Re: [reiserfs-list] CPU useage of ReiserFS

2001-07-02 Thread Russell Coker

On Saturday 30 June 2001 20:29, Jens Benecke wrote:
> I just had a, er, 'lively' discussion with someone claiming ReiserFS is
> crap because it hogs even the fastest CPU too much, and it uses 4x as
> much processing power to do metadata operations, and in general is
> slower because of the journal. My benchmarks don't reflect this,
> especially on current hardware (ATA-66 and ATA-100 disks on VIA
> chipsets).
>
> While I agree that the journal does create an additional overhead, I'd
> like to know if the CPU overhead is really that much. I've seen your
> benchmarks on the web site but they don't say anything about CPU
> useage.

I agree with Craig, I have one thing to add that Craig missed.

Every 12 to 24 months CPU speed doubles.  Now 1.4GHz CPUs with advanced 
cache and memory architectures are common while in 1990 20MHz CPUs 
without any caches were where it was at.

Hard drive speed increases much more slowly.  Now typical seek times are 
around 5ms and transfer rates are 35MB/s.  In 1990 seek times were around 
24ms and transfer rates were around 1MB/s.

For future scalability a file system that uses lots of CPU time may be 
better than a file system that uses lots of disk access.

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Re: [reiserfs-list] Frequent disk accesses (sync?) on laptop

2001-06-24 Thread Russell Coker

On Sunday 24 June 2001 19:26, Tom Vier wrote:
> if you're using bash, it's writing to ~/.bash_history.

Good guess but the .bash_history file is only updated on logout.  See the 
following:

rjc@lyta:~$ tail -f .bash_history  &
[1] 25664
fg
man bon_csv2html
cd
cd debian/bonnie++-1.92b/
less bon_csv2html.1
bug ppp
cd
fg
su -
exit
rjc@lyta:~$ sync
rjc@lyta:~$ sync
rjc@lyta:~$ sync
rjc@lyta:~$ sync
rjc@lyta:~$ sync
rjc@lyta:~$ sync
rjc@lyta:~$ sync

> On Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 11:33:29AM +0200, Russell Coker wrote:
> > I have my ReiserFS partitions mounted with noatime running 2.4.5. 
> > Every time I run sync I get disk access so atime does not explain the
> > situation.

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Re: [reiserfs-list] kernel-2.4.6-pre3 to 2.2.19 NFS tests

2001-06-23 Thread Russell Coker

On Friday 22 June 2001 14:28, Christian Mayrhuber wrote:
> > Try testing with Bonnie++, the file creation and deletion tests will
> > give interesting results!  ;)
> >
> > In one test I had an AIX machine that was moderately grunty (two fast
> > POWER CPU's, 6 hard drives on a 160MB/s bus, 256M of RAM).  When
> > running Bonnie++ I found that the AIX machine could create files on
> > my Thinkpad over a 10baseT NFS mount faster than it could create them
> > on a local JFS file system!
>
> This is not the case for me, nfs performance never reaches local disk
> performance.

Of course not.  But ReiserFS on an NFS server can outperform local disks 
running other file systems.

> I think  the network is the limiting factor.
> I don't have a idea if the bonnie file creation numbers over nfs are
> good ones or not, at least stat seems to be speedy.
>
>
> 1GHZ Athlon AMI Megaraid Raid-5 138GB/total, kernel-2.4.6-pre5, local,
> reiserfs
> Unknown,,30,14169,99,+,105,16224,91,13047,96,+,100,
>14010,100
>
> 1GHz Athlon, client, Raid-5 array mounted over a 100MBit/s network
> Unknown,,30,3578,30,13676,53,4682,33,3614,31,17797,49,4251,
>29

Now try a local Ext2 file system and see if you get more than 200 files 
created per second.  Then try a local JFS file system on AIX and see if 
you can get more than 50 files created per second.  ;)

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Re: [reiserfs-list] optimizing reiserfs for large files?

2001-06-22 Thread Russell Coker

On Saturday 23 June 2001 01:11, Lars O. Grobe wrote:
> > Also neither of those results is what you should expect from modern
> > hardware.  Machines that were typically sold in corner stores about a
> > year ago (such as the machine under my desk) return results better
> > than that.  I have attached the results of an Athlon-800 with 256M of
> > PC-133 RAM and a single 46G ATA-66 IBM hard drive.  The machine was
> > not the most powerful machine on the market when I bought it over a
> > year ago.
> >
> > What types of hard drives does the machine have?
>
>  should be quite fast sca-scsi ibm-drives. As I wrote, it's an 320GB
> array in a EXP15 connected to a IBM ServeRAID4M. The Netfinity has two
> 833MHz PIIIs.

Hmm.  Sounds like the performance you describe is less than expected, and 
the performance is being over-stated too!  When you get some more 
accurate results it'll look even worse...

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Re: [reiserfs-list] reiserfs-raw

2001-06-22 Thread Russell Coker

On Monday 18 June 2001 21:57, Henrik Nordstrom wrote:
> For Squid it would become very interesting if in some time (lets say
> about a year, maybe more) there is a good volatile permanent object
> store similar to reiserfs-raw but with a slightly more flexible
> application interface.

One thing I have considered doing if I got a large amount of spare time 
(IE something that'll never happen) is to investigate getting the 
user-mode-linux code and taking the block IO part to make file systems 
run in user-space as a database interface.  For something like a large 
squid box it might get a performance gain to have small operations 
(directory lookups) take place in user-land rather than have a system 
call for each one.

Also it could potentially have some benefits for debugging.  I thought 
that combining the above with a LD_PRELOAD library to take over the 
read/write/open/etc library calls could allow an application to think 
it's using regular files while it's really accessing a user-land process 
and talking over named pipes.  Then you could test out a new version of a 
file system without risking crashing your machine!

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Re: [reiserfs-list] optimizing reiserfs for large files?

2001-06-22 Thread Russell Coker

On Thursday 14 June 2001 12:18, grobe wrote:
> I have a significant loss of performance in bonnie tests. The "writing
> intelligently"-test
> e.g. gives me 20710 kB/s with reiserfs, while I get 24753 kB/s with
> ext2 (1 GB-file).

How much RAM do you have?  If you have more than 512M of RAM then the 
results won't be a good indication of true performance.

Also older versions of bonnie never sync the data so the performance 
report depends to a large extent on how much data remains in the 
write-back cache at the end of the test!

Bonnie++ addresses these issue.

Also neither of those results is what you should expect from modern 
hardware.  Machines that were typically sold in corner stores about a 
year ago (such as the machine under my desk) return results better than 
that.  I have attached the results of an Athlon-800 with 256M of PC-133 
RAM and a single 46G ATA-66 IBM hard drive.  The machine was not the most 
powerful machine on the market when I bought it over a year ago.

What types of hard drives does the machine have?

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Version 1.92b   --Sequential Output-- --Sequential Input- --Random-
Concurrency   1 -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
MachineSize K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
temp   496M   447  98 28609  16 10608   7   718  98 34694  15 199.8   1
Latency 22328us2074ms   56626us   57412us   43123us2984ms
Version 1.92b   --Sequential Create-- Random Create
temp-Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
  files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
 16   849  98 + +++ 15216  90   863  99 + +++  3423  98
Latency  9168us 113us 249us   12778us  41us1744us
1.92b,1.92b,temp,1,993204157,496M,,447,98,28609,16,10608,7,718,98,34694,15,199.8,1,16,849,98,+,+++,15216,90,863,99,+,+++,3423,98,22328us,2074ms,56626us,57412us,43123us,2984ms,9168us,113us,249us,12778us,41us,1744us



Re: [reiserfs-list] kernel-2.4.6-pre3 to 2.2.19 NFS tests

2001-06-22 Thread Russell Coker

On Thursday 14 June 2001 15:51, Christian Mayrhuber wrote:
> I've run bonnie on nfs over a 10MBit/s network on a ext2 and
> a reiserfs partition on the same disk.
>
> The Bad:
> 
> The performance loss to ext2 on the same disk ist quit drastic, about
> 25% and this is only over a 10MBit/s network. What will happen on a
> 100MBit/s network? I have no chance to test it on 100MBit/s, SCSI
> hardware and a 3c59x card till monday.

Try testing with Bonnie++, the file creation and deletion tests will give 
interesting results!  ;)

In one test I had an AIX machine that was moderately grunty (two fast 
POWER CPU's, 6 hard drives on a 160MB/s bus, 256M of RAM).  When running 
Bonnie++ I found that the AIX machine could create files on my Thinkpad 
over a 10baseT NFS mount faster than it could create them on a local JFS 
file system!


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Re: [reiserfs-list] Frequent disk accesses (sync?) on laptop

2001-06-22 Thread Russell Coker

On Saturday 16 June 2001 21:37, Hans Reiser wrote:
> > It's the atime update.  every time you run 'sync', the sync program's
> > atime is updated.  the next sync writes this atime update, then sync
> > gets updated again...
>
> thanks brent, nikita make a faq entry out of this.

I have my ReiserFS partitions mounted with noatime running 2.4.5.  Every 
time I run sync I get disk access so atime does not explain the situation.

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[reiserfs-list] Released Bonnie++ 1.92a

2001-06-12 Thread Russell Coker

This experimental version now has a "-z" command-line option to specify 
the seed for random number generation as suggested by several people on 
this list.

When I do repeated runs of it I don't see results being any closer 
together than when using different random seeds.  But it will hopefully 
be useful to you anyway.

Also I have fixed a bug where the experimental versions would SEGV after 
completing the IO tests for no apparent reason.

It is available on my web site (which I have just moved to a better 
connected server for faster transfers) and on Sourceforge.


Another project that I am starting to work on is an LDAP benchmark.  If 
you are interested in benchmarking LDAP servers or tuning ReiserFS for 
better OpenLDAP performance then you can talk to me off the list about 
what your requirements are (I am still in the design phase).

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Re: [reiserfs-list] Slow quotas building process ?

2001-06-01 Thread Russell Coker

On Friday 01 June 2001 13:34, Philippe Gramoulle wrote:
> Russell Coker wrote:
> >  I don't know if this explains the performance you are seeing,
> >  however I guess if you have slow CPU and high numbered UID's it
> > could cause it...
>
> I've redone the tests of building the quotas and i noted 2 things.
>
> First during the filesystem scan (lstat64 syscall) CPU usage is between
> 25 and 45%.
> But when it comes to the lseek , read , and write syscall that is
> actually building the quota file , CPU goes up to 100% so here i found
> where the bottleneck is.

That sounds to me like an issue related to the poor performance of ReiserFS 
for sparse files.  But I wouldn't expect to see that for 36M files...

> root@test:/data-sdb# ls -l /data-sdb/quota.user
> -rw---1 root root 36413184 May 30 02:08
> /data-sdb/quota.user
> root@test:/data-sdb# ls -l /data-sdc/quota.user
> -rw---1 root root 36413184 May 31 17:45
> /data-sdc/quota.user
> root@test:/data-sdb# ls -l /data-sdd/quota.user
> -rw---1 root root 36413184 Jun  1 03:03
> /data-sdd/quota.user
>
> file size is identical still (funny though ):
>
> root@test:/data-sdb# repquota /dev/sdb1 | wc -l
>9558
> root@test:/data-sdb# repquota /dev/sdc1 | wc -l
>3901
> root@test:/data-sdb# repquota /dev/sdd1 | wc -l
>3901

The best way of checking the size of quota files is with "du".  Most of the 
space will probably be holes.

> Any comment is welcome on how to make CPU usage not become a bottleneck

The options are to get a faster CPU or to wait for ReiserFS to perform better 
for holes.  I expect that by the end of the year we'll have a faster 
ReiserFS, and fast CPUs are getting cheaper all the time...

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Re: [reiserfs-list] filesystem interfaces

2001-05-22 Thread Russell Coker

On Monday 21 May 2001 23:50, Ragnar Kjørstad wrote:
> t=start_transaction();
> fd=transaction_open(t, filename, mode);
> ret=transaction_write(t, fd, buffer, size);
> transaction_close(t, fd);
> commit_transaction(t);
>
> would be nice.

The problem with that is what happens when you use libraries to do things 
with the file handle fd, you may not even have the source to the libraries...

> or if transactions can't be nested anyway, then maybe the
> transaction-handle isn't needed, and you'll get something like:
>
> int fd:
>
> start_transaction();
> fd=open(filename, mode);
> ret=write(fd, buffer, size);
  if(func())
printf("test passed\n");
> close(fd);
> commit_transaction();

What happens if the func() function happens to create files?  With your 
suggestion it will be included in the transaction which will slow things down 
needlessly.  Also if func() has successfully done it's work then a 
transaction rollback should not remove what it has done!

Maybe we should have a system call to add a file handle to the transaction.  
This system call would commit any data in write buffers to disk (logically if 
not physically) and then apply the transaction to anything that is done to it 
afterwards.

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Re: [reiserfs-list] filesystem interfaces

2001-05-20 Thread Russell Coker

On Saturday 19 May 2001 19:20, Matthias Andree wrote:
> > The caller should be able to wait for fsync to complete by using poll in
> > the case of asyn fsync.
>
> It would require introducing a special syscall, I believe. However, in
> that case, fsync should also sync all meta data related to files.

Why not just have fcntl() have a F_SETFL option to set O_NONBLOCK_SYNC?
Then for such file handles have fsync() return EAGAIN.

The application can then just have a queue of file handles it wants synced, 
and fsync() each in turn until it succeeds.

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