You are not logged in.

#1 2013-06-12 11:30:16

kdar
Member
From: Sweet home Alabama!
Registered: 2009-06-27
Posts: 356

Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

What do you think about using reiserfs on the entire system? Is it ok for /boot and / especially?

Offline

#2 2013-06-12 12:33:01

drcouzelis
Member
From: Connecticut, USA
Registered: 2009-11-09
Posts: 4,092
Website

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

Sure, using ReiserFS is OK.

Why do you ask? What do you REALLY want to know about it? smile

Offline

#3 2013-06-12 12:39:20

kdar
Member
From: Sweet home Alabama!
Registered: 2009-06-27
Posts: 356

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

I guess I was concerned about stability... or if it will effect speed of booting..

I just always been using ext before, and recently started to use ReiserFS for my external drives and some home partitions. But currently I am trying to install Arch Linux on USB jump drive and trying to decide if it is ok to use ReiserFS or not.

Last edited by kdar (2013-06-12 15:27:06)

Offline

#4 2013-06-12 13:41:46

progandy
Member
Registered: 2012-05-17
Posts: 5,184

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

As long as your boot loader/manager can read ReiserFS, you can use it for /boot. If this does not work, just create a small (~50-100MB) ext2 partition for /boot.


| alias CUTF='LANG=en_XX.UTF-8@POSIX ' |

Offline

#5 2013-06-12 15:28:37

kdar
Member
From: Sweet home Alabama!
Registered: 2009-06-27
Posts: 356

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

Do you think it would be better to create /boot partition on USB jump drive installation anyways? or is it not really that worth it?

Offline

#6 2013-06-12 16:00:52

SolarBoyMatt
Member
Registered: 2012-01-07
Posts: 263

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

In general, as long as your bootloader can boot from the filesystem you're using, I see no reason to use a seperate boot partition, unless you're sharing it with other Linux installs (which you're not), or for specific setups that might need one.

But it's your choice. If you want to have a separate boot partition then go ahead...

Last edited by SolarBoyMatt (2013-06-12 16:06:38)

Offline

#7 2013-06-12 16:12:10

kdar
Member
From: Sweet home Alabama!
Registered: 2009-06-27
Posts: 356

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

I am trying to set up syslinux..... and what do I use instead of "extlinux" with ReiserFS?

--
nevermind.. I guess syslinux doesn't support reiserfs.

Last edited by kdar (2013-06-12 16:13:07)

Offline

#8 2013-06-12 16:41:34

arokh
Member
Registered: 2013-05-30
Posts: 35

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

But why use reiserfs when you have btrfs smile

Offline

#9 2013-06-12 16:55:49

drcouzelis
Member
From: Connecticut, USA
Registered: 2009-11-09
Posts: 4,092
Website

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

arokh wrote:

But why use reiserfs when you have btrfs

Oooh, just hearing about BtrFS makes me feel all tingly. big_smile

But that raises a serious question: Out of curiosity, why did you choose ReiserFS?

Offline

#10 2013-06-22 04:10:33

GI Jack
Member
Registered: 2010-12-29
Posts: 92

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

RieserFS is legacy. ext4 is probably the way to go.

I don't see to much harm in keeping it, but ext4 will be faster. I cannot find the benchmarks now, but they were on phoronix. ext4 is faster, hands down, accross the board in all tests. Most signifigantly more so.

It also gets more development, its better supported, and better all around.

ext4 is the best general purpose filesystem on linux right now, and most likely will be until btrfs is production ready.

Offline

#11 2013-06-22 05:26:10

WonderWoofy
Member
From: Los Gatos, CA
Registered: 2012-05-19
Posts: 8,414

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

I have read in multiple places that reiserfs doesn't do very well with SMP systems (that is multi-processor/multi-core systems).  Not to say that it won't work just fine, but that its code is a bit dated and it is not able to utilize multiple processor cores. 

I agree that using ext4 is the way to go.  But I really really like btrfs.  It is quite neat.  I just recently decided to read through quite a bit of the btrfs wiki to really get an idea of what it is capable of.  I found that the first few times I used it I really didn't know what the hell I was doing.  It can do all the things!

Offline

#12 2013-06-22 21:51:05

milomouse
Member
Registered: 2009-03-24
Posts: 940
Website

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

extlinux doesn't support booting from reiserfs (as of right now), anyway.  I finally stopped using reiserfs since I'm not sure how long it will be supported.  I just use btrfs for /boot, which is great for creating backups/snapshots of your boot files in case something goes wrong.  I won't use btrfs on large partitions as it's been slower than ext4 in my experiences.  Otherthan that, I use JFS for everything outside of /boot as it's lightweight, journaled and support TRIM for solid-state drives (among other tid-bits).

Offline

#13 2013-06-22 23:34:17

WonderWoofy
Member
From: Los Gatos, CA
Registered: 2012-05-19
Posts: 8,414

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

@milomouse, when was the last time you used btrfs?  How were you comparing speeds, was this real world usage (as in how it felt) or are you going off benchmarks (either yours or found elsewhere)?  If speed is what really concerns you, and you need TRIM, journaling, etc. wouldn't ir make a whole lot more sense to go with ext4?  I have seen the benchmarks around the internets that say that btrfs is oh so much slower than the others, but honestly, I just recerntly switched from a raid0 ext4 across two samsung drives to btrfs on a just one of those, and with day-to-day stuff, I can't tell a bit of difference.  Though my boot time did slow down by about 0.3sec (gasp!).

Offline

#14 2013-06-22 23:50:33

Scimmia
Fellow
Registered: 2012-09-01
Posts: 11,463

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

With compression, btrfs becomes more competitive. You can turn off COW if you want to as well for more of a speed boost, but COW is one of the advantages of btrfs. In some situations, it can be slower, but in others, it gives similar performance to ext4 and occasionally, even better.

Online

#15 2013-06-22 23:58:28

WonderWoofy
Member
From: Los Gatos, CA
Registered: 2012-05-19
Posts: 8,414

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

Scimmia wrote:

With compression, btrfs becomes more competitive. You can turn off COW if you want to as well for more of a speed boost, but COW is one of the advantages of btrfs. In some situations, it can be slower, but in others, it gives similar performance to ext4 and occasionally, even better.

Apparently too, there were not insignficant speed improvments in the 3.9 kernel for lzo. 

Turning off CoW will improve performance?  I was ot aware of that.

Offline

#16 2013-06-23 01:15:49

milomouse
Member
Registered: 2009-03-24
Posts: 940
Website

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

WonderWoofy wrote:

@milomouse, when was the last time you used btrfs?  How were you comparing speeds, was this real world usage (as in how it felt) or are you going off benchmarks (either yours or found elsewhere)?  If speed is what really concerns you, and you need TRIM, journaling, etc. wouldn't ir make a whole lot more sense to go with ext4?  I have seen the benchmarks around the internets that say that btrfs is oh so much slower than the others, but honestly, I just recerntly switched from a raid0 ext4 across two samsung drives to btrfs on a just one of those, and with day-to-day stuff, I can't tell a bit of difference.  Though my boot time did slow down by about 0.3sec (gasp!).

Like I said, I use btrfs on /boot but nothing else at the moment.  The last time I used btrfs on a larger partition such as / or ~/ was about 6 to 8 months ago.  I admit that's a "long time" in the computer world but it was significant enough for me to finally switch to ext4 at the time.  The responsiveness at the time was like night and day, but with current improvements may be negligible today.  The most noticable difference was not reading but writing to the disk under btrfs regardless of sync settings.  I believe it was COW but I didn't want to disable due to the benefits it held.

Anyway, btrfs may be just as swift now-a-days so it's worth a try on larger partitions if you're willing to compare it.  I just found JFS to be very quick and supportive of everything I need in a filesystem as I don't do on-disk backups for / (I use external for this), but for /boot it's handy -- also, I don't automount /boot in fstab so there's less of a chance at screwing it up by accident, I will mount it manually whenever I need to rebuild kernel and copy bzImage.

Offline

#17 2013-06-25 11:28:07

arokh
Member
Registered: 2013-05-30
Posts: 35

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

I didn't notice a difference going from ext4 to btrfs. Copy on write and checksumming gives great data integrity, and snapshots are very useful. I create a snapshot on every boot and can boot into a different snapshot if need be.

Offline

#18 2013-06-28 00:51:16

ConnorBehan
Package Maintainer (PM)
From: Long Island NY
Registered: 2007-07-05
Posts: 1,359
Website

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

GI Jack wrote:

I don't see to much harm in keeping it, but ext4 will be faster. I cannot find the benchmarks now, but they were on phoronix. ext4 is faster, hands down, accross the board in all tests. Most signifigantly more so.

Were these the benchmarks? Yeah, ReiserFS lost to Ext4 by a little bit on every test.

Reiser4 won by a little bit on the "flexible IO test", lost by a lot on the "threaded IO test" and lost by a little bit on everything else.


6EA3 F3F3 B908 2632 A9CB E931 D53A 0445 B47A 0DAB
Great things come in tar.xz packages.

Offline

#19 2013-06-28 08:15:06

dag
Member
From: US
Registered: 2013-01-20
Posts: 216

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

ReiserFS is probably going to age, look at the history/(current) of the maintainer/creator.

Last edited by dag (2013-06-28 08:15:49)


--------------------------------------
alcoves wonder creates the wonder unto the ages; never lose that.

Offline

#20 2013-08-19 14:44:26

kellerman
Member
From: Latvia
Registered: 2011-07-20
Posts: 104

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

A ~year ago people suggested a lot that reiserfs can make upto 20% speed improvement (compared with ext4) when used within squid cache directory (because it deals faster with lots of small files). Is that true now?
I switched from ext4 to reiserfs for squid cache (Ubuntu Server 12.04, kernel 3.5) and it seems to be a tiny bit faster (definitely not slower).

Last edited by kellerman (2013-08-19 14:46:46)

Offline

#21 2013-08-21 17:09:43

hussam
Member
Registered: 2006-03-26
Posts: 572
Website

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

Use something that is still being "correctly" and actively maintained liked ext4 or btrfs. If you find a bug and file it, it is more likely to get fixed faster.

Last edited by hussam (2013-08-21 17:11:44)

Offline

#22 2013-08-27 18:17:57

GI Jack
Member
Registered: 2010-12-29
Posts: 92

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

ConnorBehan wrote:
GI Jack wrote:

I don't see to much harm in keeping it, but ext4 will be faster. I cannot find the benchmarks now, but they were on phoronix. ext4 is faster, hands down, accross the board in all tests. Most signifigantly more so.

Were these the benchmarks? Yeah, ReiserFS lost to Ext4 by a little bit on every test.

Reiser4 won by a little bit on the "flexible IO test", lost by a lot on the "threaded IO test" and lost by a little bit on everything else.

looks like thoose. Reiser4 won by a little bit on one test, and lost on the rest. Thats Reiser4, which is outside the main kernel tree. What you'd be using when you see Reiser is Reiser3. Which looses hands down in everything. Kernel support for Reiser4 is sporadic, and it will never be mainlined. There is no real performance gain, or any other sort of gain.

Also, from maintence, ext4 is far better maintained. It should be the de-facto choice of file system, until btrfs takes over, which it will eventually.

Offline

#23 2013-08-28 19:03:05

Gullible Jones
Member
Registered: 2004-12-29
Posts: 4,863

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

I doubt ReiserFS 3 is going away soon, but it hasn't aged well IMO. It's always had problems with stability and with performance degredation over time. I've been bitten by the stability issues myself, and would recommend switching to something else if possible.

I should also mention that (in my experience at least) ext3 has performed comparably to or better than ReiserFS for small files, since the introduction of directory indexing as a default feature.

Offline

#24 2013-08-29 17:36:47

nomorewindows
Member
Registered: 2010-04-03
Posts: 3,362

Re: Is it ok to keep /boot or / partitions are reiserfs instead of ext4?

I have ext3 and ext4 mounted used for PXE clients.  I have the same 1.5G partitioned for each partition.  My ext3 reports 1.5G of total space, and the ext4 has 1.4G of total space.  There's some overhead loss in the ext4 methinks.  With that 100MB disparity, I have about the same installation for each architecture.  I'd think the 64-bit would take up more, but it actually takes up about the same amount as the 32-bit.  The 32-bit is on the ext4 partition with the 100MB disparity, and is about 100MB more full than the 64-bit ext3 partition.  I just tried the ext4 on a less essential partition to see what would happen.


I may have to CONSOLE you about your usage of ridiculously easy graphical interfaces...
Look ma, no mouse.

Offline

Board footer

Powered by FluxBB