[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       reiserfs-devel
Subject:    (reiserfs) Re: stability of reiserfs? large file support for i386?
From:       "Vladimir V. Saveliev" <vs () namesys ! botik ! ru>
Date:       1999-08-24 10:11:28
[Download RAW message or body]

Andreas Kostyrka wrote:
> 

Hi

Thanks for interest to reiserfs.
> 
> I've been wondering how stable the reiserfs is? Are new releases usually
> reverse compatible or do I need to backup, makefs and restore?
> 

We have no unsolved bug reports for now. But I have to say, that we work
on new version of the filesystem, which is supposed to be much more
powerful and have no enough time to stress existing filesytem as much as
we would like. We are sorry for that. Therefore, we warn that it is
still under heavy designing/testing and should not be trusted by really
important data.

New version I wrote about will not be compatible with the current
version. But we do not expect it ready in the nearest month.

Also, I have to warn you about some undesired features of current
version, that are not well documented, but are important to be aware of.
1. reiserfsck works very slow for the filesystems with a lot of stuff.
2. there is no way to mount filesystem, which was not cleanly umounted.
Even readonly. It has to be repaired by reiserfsck first.
3. reiserfs works bad creating big holes in files. There is no problem
with writing to existing hole, but creating of really big hole is quite
bad in reiserfs.

All the above and big file support are to be solved in new version,
though.


> Another question: How does large file support for i386 work? (It would
> seem that the lseek API is limited to 32bit, right?)
> 

I have heart, that somewhere there is a patch which allows to have large
files on i386. Unfortunately, I can not point to it for you.
Libc has lseek64 for those files.

But reiserfs does not support big files now. 

If you will play with this filesystem, would you be as much attentive as
you can to notice any weird behaviour of the filesystem, please?

Thanks,
vs

[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]