<4> post_create: setxatter failed

[Dan Hollis]

On Wed, 25 May 2005, Russell Coker wrote:
> On Monday 23 May 2005 20:58, Dan Hollis <goemon at anime.net> wrote:
> > For us reiserfs is the clear winner for ISP workloads.
> Does it work correctly as a root file system?

Yes.

> The following extract from reiserfsck(8) indicates that it won't:
>        --rebuild-tree
>               This option rebuilds the entire filesystem tree using leaf nodes
>               found  on the device.  Normally you only need this option if the
>               reiserfsck  --check  reports  "Running  with  --rebuild-tree  is
>               required".  You are strongly encouraged to make a backup copy of
>               the whole partition before attempting the --rebuild-tree option.
>               Once  reiserfsck  --rebuild-tree  is  started it must finish its
>               work (and you should not interrupt it), otherwise the filesystem
>               will  be  left in the unmountable state to avoid subsequent data
>               corruptions.

Why does that indicate reiserfs won't function as a root file system?

> > Our reiserfs results interested a business partner of ours who used
> > to swear by ext3. They also found out reiserfs was better all round for
> > them so they are also switching.
> Unless of course they want to do some common file system recovery options such 
> as putting an image of a file system on another file system.  The last 
> reports were that if you put a Reiser3 image as a regular file in a Reiser3 
> file system then fsck would really mess things up.

Er. This is true of _any_ journaled filesystem on top of an journaled 
filesystem (xfs, jfs, and iirc ext3) due to bad interactions with linux's 
caching. The general wisdom is to not do this, no matter what filesystem.

Alternatively you could put a reiser3 image on ext2 if you really want to 
do that. It's not hard.

> > The only real caveat for reiserfs at the moment is the lack of selinux
> > support.
> How is it lacking?  In a quick test it seems to work.

reiserfs (at least up to 2.6.11.10) doesnt have working support for 
selinux attributes.

this is in fact a very well known problem[1]. though supposedly 2.6.12 is 
supposed to fix this[2].

-Dan

[1]http://www.fedorafaq.org/#reiserjfs
[2]http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_morris/3580.html