<4> post_create: setxatter failed

[Dan Hollis]

On Wed, 25 May 2005, Russell Coker wrote:
> On Wednesday 25 May 2005 21:01, Dan Hollis <goemon at anime.net> wrote:
> > Why does that indicate reiserfs won't function as a root file system?
> When (not if) the root file system needs a thorough fsck any interruption 
> (such as power failure) will result in a non-bootable system.
> But it's still a significant improvement, it used to be that --rebuild-tree 
> was not permitted on a ro mounted file system so booting from an install CD 
> was necessary to check the root fs.

Note that XFS won't let you fsck a readonly-mounted fs _at all_. Even a 
non destructive read-only check. I've argued with the XFS developers 
about this and they stated they don't see this as a problem and they're 
not going to fix it. I have no idea why they think this is a good idea.

> > Alternatively you could put a reiser3 image on ext2 if you really want to
> > do that. It's not hard.
> Sure it's not hard.  That's nice to know AFTER you've done it and had your 
> data corrupted (as has happened to several people).

Who?

> > > > 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.
> The latest rawhide kernel seems to have it.  Did you do any tests?

You mean FC4T3 installer has it? Or you mean the latest kernel 
downloadable via yum updater?

> Finally, are there still known situations where a corrupt ReiserFS file system 
> could corrupt kernel memory?  This was the bug that got me to convert the 
> root file systems of machines I own to use Ext2/3.

None that I know of. If there were you would expect them to be reported in 
linux-kernel or bugzilla, and I don't see anything.

I do however see some serious recent issues with ext3:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=149478
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=139374

We can go around in circles endlessly posting tit-for-tat comparisons of 
ext3 and reiserfs. Neither FS is flawless and both have their issues. 
However reiserfs has been perfect for our needs in every way and in 
production systems has shown zero failures whereas we had many total 
losses with ext3.

-Dan