View Source: ReiserFS - Waikato Linux Users Group

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[ReiserFS] is a new FileSystem for Linux developed by HansReiser at a company he owns. He believes that [FileSystem]s should be good enough that you don't need to use a dedicated database to store data. Rather than following the traditional Unix-like inode / bitmap based approach, [ReiserFS] stores all data including the metadata in a [BTree]. This leads to blazing fast performance especially when dealing with a slew of small files, a situation in which a traditional FileSystem' performance breaks down. It supports packing tails and [journalling|FileSystem].

Unfortunately, the tree structure used is also the weak point of [ReiserFS]: if any of it gets corrupted, chances are that much more data will be affected than under traditional [FileSystem]s. Rather than losing a single file to corruption of an inode, you may lose almost the entire contents of your disk if metadata close to the root of the [BTree] is affected. Fortunately, the likelihood of this happening due to bugs has been dramatically reduced in more recent version of the driver. Hardware failure caused corruption is still a serious problem, though.

Many people therefor don't want to trust [ReiserFS] with critical data. However, it should not be dismissed off hand. Its capabilities to handle very large directories and deal with huge numbers of tiny files very efficiently make it a prime choice for cases where performance matters and data is replacable - it is __strongly__ recommended as the foundation for a [Squid] cache or a news server.

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Last edited on Monday, May 15, 2006 12:34:29 pm by CraigBox

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