Is there a way to tune a reiserfs partition's settings such as 'max-mount-counts' or the other standard setting found in tune2fs.

tune2fs says it is for ext2/3, and reiserfstune offers no settings for the standard tunning features.


Thanks,
Jeff

http://howto.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

Due to the completely different internal structure, many of the tuning options for ext filesystems would not be appropriate (meaningless, actually) for reiser.

Some of the distros with more useful install/partitioning systems give you options at install time that are useful for tuning. All this stuff does is set up your fstab for you, which is nice, but you could also do it manually.

Assuming that you either have one of the less useful ones and/or you don't want to re-install, the more useful settings are:

noatime - turns off 'access time'. Can be a significant performance boost under some load scenarios, and can be barely measureable in others

notail - stops the fs from storing small files in the end of the tree storing file metadata. A performance reduction in most situations.

nojou - turns off journalling. You may wonder why you might want to use a journalling filesystem with journalling turned off (well, I did at first). But this would allow you to get the performance boost of the tail storage without the overhead of journalling. I would only use this for filesystems like temp or spool for which I wasn't that concerned about data security. Note that I haven't actually tried this, but I just might on a server which had lots of temporary file traffic.

(Note also that I wouldn't bother with any of the journalling filesystems for my boot partition: Plain ext2 should be fine for that, and in some circumstances, reiser causes a real performance loss here; not sure about ext3.)

I have read up on the both options available with reiserfstune and the options available using mount 'type reiserfs', http://www.namesys.com/mount-options.html

I also understand that the journaling systems are different and certainly some setting don't exist or are extra compared with ext3.

But the partition does get checked(fsck.reiserfs) at a certain interval. Probably default 30 mounts. I would assume that this is configurable somewhere. 'Mount' or what ever, somehow knows how many mounts there have been, and when to run a check.

Thanks.....
Jeff
http://howto.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page


ps.

I partitioned the drives my self, years ago, when installing Gentoo. My fstab is fairly boring. Example....
/dev/hda2 / reiserfs noatime 0 1
/dev/hdd1 /mnt/tentacle reiserfs defaults 0 1

My understanding is that reiserfsck is run in '--check' mode on every start up. If no errors are found, start up just proceeds normally, but if errors are found then one of the fix modes is invoked (probably --fix-fixable, but maybe --rebuild-tree). The details of what happens beyond the initial 'test partition and see if there are errors' may be distro-specific, with particular patterns of which fix mode to try first and which fix modes being used as a last resort being variable.

I really think that it is inadvisable to skip any of the testing for errors on startup, and it seems even worse to operate with known errors, so you are on your own beyond here...

You are correct that it is checked automatically on 'certain' errors. But see 'man tune2fs', the partitions are also checked on regular intervals, based on time between checks or number of mounts


This is the contents of the journal of a ext3 partition, my /boot, via 'dumpe2fs'

dumpe2fs 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007)
Filesystem volume name: <none>
Last mounted on: <not available>
Filesystem UUID: d28a7b79-6f63-4081-b578-7824efd2e37c
Filesystem magic number: 0xEF53
Filesystem revision #: 1 (dynamic)
Filesystem features: filetype sparse_super
Default mount options: (none)
Filesystem state: not clean
Errors behavior: Continue
Filesystem OS type: Linux
Inode count: 26104
Block count: 104388
Reserved block count: 5219
Free blocks: 81559
Free inodes: 26049
First block: 1
Block size: 1024
Fragment size: 1024
Blocks per group: 8192
Fragments per group: 8192
Inodes per group: 2008
Inode blocks per group: 251
Filesystem created: Fri Mar 9 17:01:38 2007
Last mount time: Sun Oct 7 12:17:20 2007
Last write time: Sun Oct 7 12:17:20 2007
Mount count: 5
Maximum mount count: 32
Last checked: Fri Oct 5 18:00:12 2007
Check interval: 15552000 (6 months)
Next check after: Wed Apr 2 18:00:12 2008
Reserved blocks uid: 0 (user root)
Reserved blocks gid: 0 (group root)
First inode: 11
Inode size: 128
Default directory hash: tea
Directory Hash Seed: 464bd877-8ff3-4193-8404-37b13de527dc
.............
.............
.............
and so on

as you can see the mount count is '5' out of '32', my understanding is on 32 mounts it is forced to be rechecked

Jeff
http://howto.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

I have looking into the journal of a reiserfs partition and it seems you are correct. There is no entries for max mount count


debugreiserfs -J /dev/hdd1

debugreiserfs 3.6.19 (2003 www.namesys.com)


Filesystem state: consistency is not checked after last mounting

Reiserfs super block in block 16 on 0x1641 of format 3.6 with standard journal
Count of blocks on the device: 19537040
Number of bitmaps: 597
Blocksize: 4096
Free blocks (count of blocks - used [journal, bitmaps, data, reserved] blocks): 2109793
Root block: 1349665
Filesystem is NOT clean
Tree height: 5
Hash function used to sort names: "r5"
Objectid map size 24, max 972
Journal parameters:
Device [0x0]

Magic [0x31cfad98]
Size 8193 blocks (including 1 for journal header) (first block 18)
Max transaction length 1024 blocks
Max batch size 900 blocks
Max commit age 30
Blocks reserved by journal: 0
Fs state field: 0x0:
sb_version: 2
inode generation number: 396132
UUID: e81e1865-2a7d-4530-bd55-21eaeb716e91
LABEL:
Set flags in SB:
ATTRIBUTES CLEAN
Journal header (block #8210 of /dev/hdd1):
j_last_flush_trans_id 114427
j_first_unflushed_offset 1954
j_mount_id 696
Device [0x0]
Magic [0x31cfad98]
Size 8193 blocks (including 1 for journal header) (first block 18)
Max transaction length 1024 blocks
Max batch size 900 blocks
Max commit age 30

So then what sets/controls the interval of error checking... My system does not crash. I reboot it every day. and about once a month my 300GB HD gets checked. ( i haven't actually timed it, but is seems constant..)


Thanks
Jeff
http://howto.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page