> > Well, although all of reiser/ext3-fs and raid are very fine stuff, I would
> > definitely vote for SW-RAID to be preferred (if they can´t be included
> > alltogether due to incompatibilities)
!
> Thankfully, they can and will be living happily together,
This would be, of course, the best. I personally also would have no problem
if they were both included although they have incompatibilites - this just
has to be documented and maybe there has to be some
#if defined (SWRAID) && (defined(REISERFS) || defined(EXT3FS))
#error Cannot have both SW RAID and ReiserFS/Ext3FS - disable one of them!
#endif
> so I'm not sure that it'd make sense
> to kick out 2 journaling fs's (that can and most likely will be used on
> 99.999% of desktop-and-above Linux machines)
Kick out means that they have to be "in" first.
Desktop users can work with reiserfs/ext3 as they can with ext2 (well, they
did for years ;-).
> in favor of s/w raid that's likely to stay in the minority userbase
Looking at hdd prices and capacities in the xx GB range, it is not far
fetched that many people would use RAID-0 or -1 at least, if it was a
standard feature in standard kernel.
> For 24x7-ish machines with TB-range filesystems, you're talking *lots*
> of time in fsck...
I know. I also wished I had a journalling file system when my (SW RAID)
machine crashed. But, as I said, I would prefer a 2.4 kernel without
journaling but with RAID instead of a 2.4 with journaling but without RAID
(so I would have to stay with 2.2 until 2.6 8( ).
SW/HW crashes can be reduced by running stable SW/HW.
Head crashes on HDDs can´t be reduced - they just happen some day.
> for machines where minutes of downtime mean piles
> of cash lost in transactions (amazon, cisco's site, etc)...
As they would not use SW RAID (they have enough cash to buy a HW controller),
for them the defined(...) solution would be nice - if that can´t be resolved
in a better way until 2.4.
> "not as widespread use" may or may not be true... ext3 is in the rawhide
> kernels and gets used on every laptop in my LUG
Do they crash so often or do they have this big hdds ???
> compared to only 3 or 4 of us that are using the s/w raid capabilities.
Speaking of notebooks, it´s a bit of a problem with SW RAID <g>.
> Do you really believe after their use has been diseeminated down to the
> major distributions that s/w raid will get more use than journalling?
> With sct's performance numbers being what they are (and resierfs being
> b-tree based), sticking with ext2 is a loss for new installations.
Having to spend $$$($) for HW RAID or having to stay with 2.2 is a loss, too
;-)
> That you don't have enough confidence in the code bases at this time
> is understandable, but long-term it's hardly realistic to say s/w raid
> will dominate.
Long term we will have all of them, hopefully.
> For a good break-down of what we should expect, we can look at WinNT
> (like it or not :) which has s/w raid
If I´m informed right, it just has mirroring and striping, not RAID5.
> *and* a journalling fs (NTFS).
NTFS is what ??? Journalling ???
> I'd dare say it's painfully obvious that NTFS gets much more use than
> their s/w raid capabilities.
Maybe their mirroring/striping stuff is painfully, too (didn´t try it with NT
- who wants an NT server anyway ???).
Thomas
