Comments on: XFS vs Reiser

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:48:50 +0000

As Will stated, XFS require tuning for performance. This webpage is quite interesting

Personally, I haven’t tried XFS, but it sounds quite good…

By: will

will — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 08:39:10 +0000

I like them all. Some require tuning for good performance, expecially xfs, and some don’t work well with some kernels.

my personal
/dev/hda5 on / type reiserfs (rw,noatime,data=writeback,notail)
/proc on /proc type proc (rw)
/sys on /sys type sysfs (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/hda8 on /1 type reiser4 (rw,noatime)
/dev/hdi3 on /2 type xfs (rw,noatime,nodiratime,logbufs=4,logbsize=256k)
/dev/hda10 on /4 type jfs (rw,noatime,nodiratime)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)

By: jimcooncat

jimcooncat — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:52:41 +0000

Update 4/29/08: John Dong (jdong) has enlightened me regarding the waning support of ReiserFS. The website of the developing company, Namesys, has now gone offline. OpenSUSE did have good reasons to stop using it as the default filesystem, and I wished I’d run across their reasoning earlier (link below). I’m reevaluating, and will probably start using Ext3 instead.

http://blog.linuxoss.com/2006/09/27/suse-102-ditching-reiserfs-as-it-default-fs/

By: Trevor

Trevor — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:05:19 +0000

Guess this solves the whole debate.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/reiser-guilty-o.html

ReiserFS will start to fade away.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:49:26 +0000

I have to agree with jdong and most of the others about XFS. It’s certainly not good (possibly very poor) for regular desktop filesystem partitions, but I’ve been using it for years on my storage drive(s) without any problems. It’s varied from 200gb drive up to a ~1 tb RAID 5 array…. holding movies, mp3′s, backup tar archives, and other large files it excels greatly at. Never had any corruption issues in the past 5-6 years I’ve used it. It also excels at very large partitions and guaranteed I/O rate. Supposedly JFS is somewhat decent at this as well but cannot give any real experience.

I’ve actually heard ReiserFS was the worst for stability issues although this was at some time ago. Have not used it but know it’s fast for large amounts of small files especially with lots of creation/deletions…. /var or /tmp perhaps?

Personally use XFS on my fileserver RAID array (running NFS) and ext3 for all partitions on all other boxes. Highly recommend against using ext3 for any large partitions, tried it – it’s crazy slow.

By: Scott Wegner

Scott Wegner — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 22:49:05 +0000

I plan on reformatting my HDD next week and starting anew when stable Hardy comes out. As such, it’s one of my goals to try out new filesystems to fit my needs. Previously I’ve been dual-booting, so I had ext3 for Ubuntu partition, and NTFS for data. But, I’d like to try ReiserFS for the Linux partition, and perhaps XFS or JFS for the data partition. I use MythTV and store a lot of large video files on the data partition, so I’ve heard XFS and JFS are both good options. Is one better than the other?

By: jldugger

jldugger — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:14:21 +0000

Unless you have redundant power, I’d stick with with ext3. Like Kees, I’ve seen XFS corrupt data on power failure. The FAQ on the subject used to say “If it hurts, don’t do it” as if the only reason this happened was people forcing power off.

If you’re really after benchmarking etc, it might be informative to the general Linux using public to examine multiple versions of ext4, as we can expect the performance characteristics to change over time.

By: Scott James Remnant

Scott James Remnant — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:19:48 +0000

…and if you’re after your data, use ext3

By: Kees Cook

Kees Cook — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:15:51 +0000

I have to agree with most people here.

XFS: I have seen repeated, disastrous, corruptions with XFS. It has eaten libc upgrades, it truncates files, it wrecks its own metadata. I cannot recommend against it strongly enough.

ReiserFS: in the general case, this FS is okay. However, recovering it from corruption can take literally hours, and it has a tiny fraction of the number of developers as ext3.

Since ext3 can grow while mounted, handles recovery well, and has tons of developers, I think it’s the best choice unless you have really really specific needs.

By: jdong

jdong — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:44:57 +0000

Err, when your reiser requires a fsck, good luck It’s about the MOST sensitive fscker to random data on the disk and easily gets side-tracked and rebuilds a trash B-tree and calls it quits.

XFS is not designed to be a desktop filesystem where a good proportion of your files are small and constantly created/deleted. It is good for a storage partition for your multimedia content though — possibly the best suited for the job.

By: Travis

Travis — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:36:30 +0000

Interesting Jeff. In my experience, using reiser for several years, it is the best at recovering. Actually, I’ve found that it’s better at recovering than xfs. I built 2 machines with xfs and had multiple corruptions, especially with my firefox profile for some reason. I’ve never lost a byte to reiser.

XFS is not particularly suited for a desktop machine … man it felt slow.

Reiser always feels fast.

By: Jeff Schroeder

Jeff Schroeder — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:06:59 +0000

Not long ago, there was a guy on Linux kernel planet that blogged about creating a new filesystem. He did exhaustive benchmarks on the main Linux filesystems to see what he was up against. Here are some non-biased benchmarks for you to look at:

http://tservice.net.ru/~s0mbre/old/?section=projects&item=fs_contest2

reiser3 and resier4 get pretty impressive results in a lot of areas. From experience, reiserfs is the WORST filesystem at recovering from hard shutdowns. It is more likely to corrupt itsself and require an fsck than any other filesystem.

By: Leandro Peracchi

Leandro Peracchi — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:03:23 +0000

Hi!

I´m from Brazil.

I want to install Ubuntu on a computer with two identical hard drives using RAID1 and encrypted volumes.

In 7.10 there was a bug that doesn´t allow install this way.

I tried one build of 8.04 and appears to me that the same bug is still there…

Do you know something about this?

P.S.: sorry for my poor english…

By: jimcooncat

jimcooncat — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:33:00 +0000

John (jdong): That is excellent info! Perhaps it’s time for me to start reconsidering what I’m doing.

Aaron: I’ll be watching for your followup. Good luck!

By: jimcooncat

jimcooncat — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:25:06 +0000

I’ve been a ReiserFS fan for years, since building my first in-house mail server from Gentoo and Qmail, many years ago. A few tips on its use (the first for ANY filesystem):

Check your hard disk before committing your personal data to it. Run badblocks shortly after installation, and if there are any, consider trashing the disk. If you can afford the time to set it up, install smartmontools to use modern disks’ ability to warn you if the disk is going bad.

When mounting a partition that boots, (/ or a separate /boot partition), use the -notail option. This prevents small files from staying absorbed in the filesystem, which boot managers don’t like. You can also use it for partitions you want maximum performance on at the expense of disk space. The old Gentoo docs used to specify a separate /boot partition because of this. That’s too much to maintian for me. I use a / partition with -notail, but a separate /home without the option. Perhaps next time I’ll use -notail on /home too, but my systems are working great for now.

Most filesystems (I don’t know about XFS or other esoteric ones) bog down when approaching maximum capacity. I’ve found (through observation only, no benchmarks) that somewhere between 90% and 95% full the disk screaming stops and my own screaming starts. I set a monitor (I use monit, but a quick cron/bash script would work well) to warn me at 80% full. Then it’s time for me to start purging back to 60% or start planning to increase capacity.

Note that we’re NOT talking about Reiser4, we’re talking about ReiserFS.