Re: reiserfs on all my SRM-alpha drives: how I did it

[Michal Jaegermann <michal ellpspace math ualberta ca>]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2001 at 09:13:46AM -0500, James D. Freels wrote:
> Michal,
> 
> Do you have references you can cite on the problems people have had 
> with reiserfs?  Are these problems with some of the earlier versions?  

My sources consists mostly from what I read on linux-kernel mailing
list where reports "reiserfs ate my filesystem", or "my filesystem
is ok but data are screwed" are pretty standard if not really everyday
fare.  It is true that after numerous bug fixes, rewrites and format
changes (Chris Mason did a lot of an excellent work) their frequency
now seem to be lower.  ReiserFS until quite recently was also unusable
with NFS.  This is supposedly currently fixed but personally I would
be very careful in this respect unless this is used on scratch and
experimental systems.  After what I have seen ReiserFS does not give
me much confidence for now.  There are numerous reports of "works for
me" kind.  That is fine but if bugs hit only in some "weird" usage
patterns there is no guarantee that my usage will not turn out to
be "weird".

It is also quite unfortunate that http://www.reiserfs.org contains much
hype, and claims that raise alarm flags, but it is hard (possible at
all?) to find there a hard technical information.  In particular my
information that reiserfs journals only metadata, by design, comes
not from any ReiserFS documents but from peple whom I believe have
some pretty good idea what they are talking about.

  Michal