I initially resisted moving to ext4 because the code has a lot of cruft. I thought that ext4 would be a step backwards from ReiserFS, which is quite elegant.

I'm now finding that the crufty working filesystem is infinitely preferable to the elegant broken one. :)
Cheers,
Ed

Hi EdGr,

My problem with ext4 is the same as with ext3: in my experience, it's not a reliable file system if things go wrong. Even simple things like a lockup/panic, or an unexpected poweroff, has a high probability of corrupting the filesystem in a way that it can't recover by itself on the next boot (and to think that a *log* structured filesystem was supposed to solve almost exactly that problem... :-/). Reiserfs, on the other hand, has had its (virtual) power plug yanked from it hundreds of times in my tests (resetting the VM where I'm running it) and it has never ever lost any data, or been incapable of booting.

My problem with btrfs for now is that it's simply too immature (the patch descriptions that people are constantly submitting reads like a bizantine horror story)... I do hope that the developers manage to stabilize things quickly and also that they change its stupid (IMNSHO) behavior regarding the handling of free space vs erased files... the current behavior is very unintitive and manages to crash my tests using dledford-memtest (and other stressing programs that I use to validate an installation) due to "out-of-disk-space" conditions, even though (when you account for the files that have been removed) there's still a whole lot of space left.

LOL! You are so right... ;-) in fact, I think I will copy your phrase to our local "fortune" file... how do you want to be cited?

Cheers,
--
Durval.

I wanted to use ReiserFS on new servers I'm going to install very soon, because I use ReiserFS almost exclusively from 2004. But now I see that while it works flawlessly on my single-cpu machines (don't have any multi-core around), things may go haywire on much newer hardware. So I'll give ext4 try. Thanks for this thread and suggestions.

Agreed: ReiserFS was very good at surviving power outages and crashes. Thanks for the warning about ext4 - I haven't been using it for long enough to find out how robust it is.

EdGr at linuxquestions.org. Thanks!
Ed

Hi EdGr,
As far as I'm concerned (and while ZFSOnLinux and btrfs don't become viable options), ReiserFS still is :-)

You are welcome. Resisting power outages is really important for us here because some of our clients have really bad electrical infrastructure and additionally can't afford an UPS for every machine, specially when they are widely dispersed in a plant. And resisting crashes is important for our development, as we do crazy server-crashing stuff frequently and it sucks having to reinstall an entire machine from backup because the filesystem just went poo-poo on you... :-)

Cheers,
--
Durval.

LOL I do not want to laugh but ReiserFS is among the least robust filesystem I have ever used. I had nothing but problems with ReiserFS, as i said before lame ass FAT(16/32) was a better FS for stability in my experience than reiser.

Unless ZFS, or at least ZFSOnLinux gets forked gets re-licensed to maybe MIT, or Linux gets relicensed to something other than GPL, like MIT, that's more open to other open-source licenses, we'll never get ZFS on Linux officially.

It's a shame because ZFS has withstood the test of time for over 10 years now and has been the premiere of UNIX file systems. heck BtrFS can barely mimic and has yet perform the same functions as ZFS.