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I have a new notebook, which I back up every day because it's a notebook. Recently I converted all of its partitions except /boot (to support grub) to Reiser4 (from 3.6). (Converted through some heroic maneuvering while booting with init=/bin/bash, not by writing a conversion utility.)
I figure I can either suffer in silence or share my experiences.
So far, performance seems very good, and finally my problem of disk access is solved -- it spins down! For 10 or 15 minutes at a time! Space efficiency also looks much better. I don't know if anyone on this list uses Gentoo, but the directory /usr/portage typically has 60 or 70 megabytes of mostly byte to kilobyte sized files, within two layers of fairly large (100 +) directories of directories. Being prudent, I put it on its own half-gig partition. With v3, it uses around 120 megs. With v4, 60 or 70.
Other nice things -- speed is definitely better, but it usually doesn't matter. I don't see a noticeable difference with desktop apps, but most of the time, they are a certain size and take a certain amount of time to open, and after that, there's very little disk access (or even CPU usage -- they mostly wait for input). I can't test much else -- music would not be noticeable except while ripping, and I haven't tried gaming. The places that I see performance improvements are places like tar, rsync (that /usr/portage dir gets rsynced every day), and program installation (which involves automatic fetching, unpacking, compiling, and installing of source tarballs). I haven't really been able to measure CPU usage, as I haven't actually run benchmarks -- these are just impressions.
Every now and then I have a crash. It happens gradually, as it's locallized to the filesystem -- I can keep working in any program that does not access the filesystem (so you can imagine how long that lasts). Once a program touches the filesystem after this "crash", it stops responding, so I get the _effect_ of the entire system locking up in about 15 or 20 seconds. I'm not complaining -- this machine came with WinXP home!
Interesting looking lines in the logs (not all of them new since Reiser4):
Nov 22 18:29:10 [kernel] WARNING: Flushing like mad: 65536
Nov 22 22:46:14 [kernel] spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7.
Nov 22 22:50:49 [kernel] reiser4[ktxnmgrd:run(11)]: commit_current_atom (fs/reiser4/txnmgr.c:1184)[nikita-3176]:
(Note that these lines are not one after another -- they are fairly scattered.)
After these crashes, typical results are -- nothing. I don't notice anything different in dmesg -- just "loading reiser4 bitmap......done (124 jiffies)" (the number of jiffies changes). If I'm supposed to see something else, this is a bug in implementation. If I'm not, it's a bug in design -- I should know when things were not unmounted cleanly. I haven't seen any corruption either directly or indirectly (through the reaction of individual programs) -- seems like just whatever made it to disk, made it, and whatever didn't, didn't -- so the atomicity seems to work.
I've been running like this for 2 or 3 days now. I can't reproduce the crash with any specific activity, just seems to happen about once a day (or as reliable as win2k if you don't game). It's also been happening most often when I'm gone, having left long-ish builds running. Not often enough to be inconvenient, just often enough to give me a little adrenaline rush every time I log on.
I'd welcome any patches, and I'm willing to run tests. I can't really hack it now -- maybe next summer.
Looking forward to a stable version -- this technology belongs on my servers!
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