Reiser4

[naveenchandran]

Reiser4

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is the Primary sponsor of
Reiser4. DARPA does not endorse this project; it merely sponsors it.

Reasons why Reiser4 is great for you:
Reiser4 is the fastest filesystem, and here are the benchmarks.

Reiser4 is an atomic filesystem, which means that your filesystem operations either entirely occur, or they entirely don't, and they don't corrupt due to half occuring. We do this without significant performance losses, because we invented algorithms to do it without copying the data twice.

Reiser4 uses dancing trees, which obsolete the balanced tree algorithms used in databases (see farther down). This makes Reiser4 more space efficient than other filesystems because we squish small files together rather than wasting space due to block alignment like they do. It also means that Reiser4 scales better than any other filesystem. Do you want a million files in a directory, and want to create them fast? No problem.

Reiser4 is based on plugins, which means that it will attract many outside contributors, and you'll be able to upgrade to their innovations without reformatting your disk. If you like to code, you'll really like plugins....

Reiser4 is architected for military grade security. You'll find it is easy to audit the code, and that assertions guard the entrance to every function.

V3 of reiserfs is used as the default filesystem for SuSE, Lindows, FTOSX, Libranet, Xandros and Yoper. We don't touch the V3 code except to fix a bug, and as a result we don't get bug reports for the current mainstream kernel version. It shipped before the other journaling filesystems for Linux, and is the most stable of them as a result of having been out the longest. We must caution that just as Linux 2.6 is not yet as stable as Linux 2.4, it will also be some substantial time before V4 is as stable as V3.


http://www.namesys.com/v4/v4.html
http://www.namesys.com/benchmarks.html

[mehulved]

That's good news. But, I am eagerly awaiting reiser 4 fs to become stable. I really want to try it out when the stable version is available and hope it's soon.

[eddie]

Reiser4 is all good and dandy speed wise but it might never get into official kernel until they fix the VFS and Plugins system. Linux developers are dead against it right now.

[mediator]

Oh damn I just installed knoppix 4.0.2 on laptop works great....it asked for file system and had an option for reiser! I aint know how good it is.

[nach p]

While installing FC5 or Ubuntu 5.10 it doesnt show the option for reiser file system.
Currently which distros have an option of Reiser?
When it becomes available in all distros.!!!

Although reiserfs file system is not available with Fedora and Ubuntu?
Tuxians Correct me if I am wrong ?

[mehulved]

It is available with Ubuntu for sure and in FC too, to the best of my knowledge.

[ujjwal]

nach_p, if you are talking about Reiser V4, one distribution which has implemented it is Zenwalk..

Reiser V3 is supported by many distributions, including Ubuntu, Slackware, Arch and Suse.

I used to prefer reiser over other filesystems earlier, but to be honest, there is no noticable performance difference between it and others, even on my ageing harware. For me, stability is much more important, and so I prefer ext3 or ext2 these days.

[eddie]

Originally Posted by ujjwal

I used to prefer reiser over other filesystems earlier, but to be honest, there is no noticable performance difference between it and others, even on my ageing harware. For me, stability is much more important, and so I prefer ext3 or ext2 these days.

May be it is actually because of your ageing hardware that you don't see any difference. I find reiser3 much better in performance then ext3.

BTW what kind of stability problems did you experience with reiser3?