ReiserFS vs. ext3

[ibowtotux]

I've seen that the benchmarks are in ReiserFS' favor, but how come so many distros still have ext3 as default?

[Flatline]

Because it is a tried-and-true and extremely well-tested filesystem. The recovery tools for it are quite good, and since it has been around for so long (ext3 is just the ancient ext2 filesystem with journaling tacked on) it is very well documented and therefore easy to work with.

Having said that, I have seen somewhat of a trend recently among the "desktop" distros to move toward reiserfs. ext3 just has the inertia within the community to keep its spot as the de facto default.

[ibowtotux]

nifty...thank you my amigo

[bigtomrodney]

I think there wasa some jive about ReiserFS not being supported by lilo or grub or something, though I've used it for a good while with Mdk. That problem is gone now AFAIK.

[whisker]

I think there wasa some jive about ReiserFS not being supported by lilo or grub or something, though I've used it for a good while with Mdk. That problem is gone now AFAIK.

im usin reiser and grub and thers no problems

[genesus]

one thing that I noticed about reiserfs that I cannot set with e2fs -j is that it is quite easy when mking the fs to manually set a higher number of inodes [is this right?, think that's what they are called anyway] which helps with space and journaling if you have many small files.

[Flatline]

Moving large numbers of small files has traditionally been where reiserfs shines; on the other side of things, you have xfs, which is especially good at moving very large files. That's part of the reason that my fs recommendations can vary depending on what the person wants to do with the system (mp3s or video editing, for example).

[jaboua]

Moving large numbers of small files has traditionally been where reiserfs shines; on the other side of things, you have xfs, which is especially good at moving very large files. That's part of the reason that my fs recommendations can vary depending on what the person wants to do with the system (mp3s or video editing, for example).

reiser4 should from what I've heard be a lot faster than ext3 on bigger files too... Just waiting to test linux 2.6.12 then

[bigtomrodney]

My mistake - it was lilo that used to have the trouble here

I remembered that it was mentioned in LXF, because slack comes with ResierFS support now but they mentioned that it wouldn't boot if it was selected.

[genesus]

thats odd, i used to use slack 10 with reiserfs, booted with lilo, and everything worked fine...must be an old issue