Hello everyone. I've converted my notebook's file system to reiser4 and have been using it for a few months to test it before converting two other desktops to reiser4. So far, I havn't lost any data so I guess it's reliable enough. I'm confident that reiser fs will emerge to be a defacto file system due to its extentibility (even xfs isn't as scalable as it says it is since it doesn't support plugins). My only beef with it are the following:

The laptop is a vaio pcgfxa32 circa 2001 (900mhz, 256mb, 15gb)

1. I hardly notice any increased performance. I guess this is because laptop hard disks are much more slower than desktop ones, so this could be a bottle neck. Disk noise has virtually ceased though.


2. The file fragmentation is worse than ext3's. When I download a 50mb video clip from a file sharing program, filefrag reports an average of 500 to 1500 fragments (disk used/total: 3500mb/4000mb). Even with static copy operations, the fragmentation is much worse than ext3's.

3. I can't play Half-life or use rpm with certain operations (when /var/lib/rpm is on a reiser4 file system) when they're located on a reiser4 file system. Someone told me that this is because of a bug in reiser4 where you are able to cd into any file that have the execute bit set.

Any comments or insights?
Thanks for any help,
Yale

I just put the / partition of my laptop on reiser4 and that went ugly so I can't say anything from personal experience.
What I gathered so far is that people that tarred the partitions they want to migrate and then untarred them to reiser4 seem to have performance problems after a while.Read/writes are getting slower after some time (they claim).
That doesn't seem to be an issue if the whole data gets just moved.
Downloads from file sharing programs are not a good indicator for fragmentation since the file gets split up in a bunch of pieces alrady to start with.Had a ext3 partition once that would only write to a burner with 8-10x max since it was seeking the next piece most of the time.

Got no idea about the rpm thing.