KernelTrap has an interesting article about a recent benchmark conducted to compare five journaling filesystems available with the current 2.6.0-test2 Linux development kernel. The tests were conducted with a very simple shell script, mainly timing how long it takes to copy, tar, and remove directories. Looks like reiser4 is the fastest filesystem at the expense of consuming much more CPU, with ext3 trailing a ways behind.
Benchmarking Filesystems In 2.6 Linux Kernel
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I think I read somewhere that with reiser/reiser4, it doesn’t guarantee that data loss (from colotions) won’t occur. As with ext3, you don’t have to worry about data intriguity Is this correct?
You’re correct: for ext3, you can choose to journalise meta-data only (which is what reiser do) or to journalise also data: which is far slower!
>As with ext3, you don’t have to worry about data intriguity.
Well, any JFS cannot protect against bad blocks or bad disks..
So ‘don’t worrying about data integrity’ is bit too strong IMHO!
I don’t know if many people use the ‘journalise data’ mode of ext3: it would be much more slower than ‘journalise meta-data’..
By default, ext3 will use ‘ordered’ mode.
>> As with ext3, you don’t have to worry about data intriguity Is this correct?
If I were you, I would start worrying right now.
/me lost all data on his ext3 root partition 2 days ago
(just by a crashing XFree86 and resetting the system)
Wouldn’t it be nice if someone did exactly the same test on a UNIX OS running the same filesystem. At least one filesystem that is compatible with both OS’s.
hmm… my favorite is XFS… but i’ve to admit not to have used ext3 anytime.
I used ReiserFS and if fried my data twice. Since then i use XFS and it has proven not to fry my data.
Though i know my Hardware is kinda broke, XFS handles it with care.
reg.
John Doe
renoX
> You’re correct: for ext3, you can choose to journalise
> meta-data only (which is what reiser do) or to journalise
> also data: which is far slower!
You are correct that reiserfs v3 provides meta-data only journalling. But reiser4 has full data journalling. This is not far slower, because of wandering logs. You can read more
detailed description at the http://namesys.com/v4/v4.html
One thing i have to say about ext3 is that its damn reliable. Ive had it running for upwards of a year and a half without a single issue. Ive had xfs and reiser both burn data in the past (admittedly for reiser it was _before_ it was integrated into kernel proper). However, in my experience if you just want to pull data really really fast (think > 400MB (yes bytes not bits) per second) off a raid array you cant beat xfs.
Reiser4 is almost twice as fast(!) as the second best option, and that with full data journaling, not just metadata journaling.
And the CPU usage statistic is kind of misleading. If Reiser4 writes twice as much data per second, it is only natural that it consumes about twice as much CPU cycles.
The CPU numbers should be total cycles to get a more meaningful comparison. I multiplied the CPU percentage with the total time of the operation to get a number for the total cycles consumed (here called CPU Seconds or CPUs)
reiser4 171.28s, 42.90 CPUs (1.0000x time; 0.77x CPU)
reiserfs 302.53s, 48.32 CPUs (1.7663x time; 0.87x CPU)
ext3 319.71s, 35.17 CPUs (1.8666x time; 0.63 CPU)
xfs 429.79s, 55.80 CPUs (2.5093x time; 1.00 CPU)
jfs 470.88s, 6%CPU 28.25 CPUs (2.7492x time 0.51x CPU)
As you can see, Reiser4 looks much better in the CPU usage if you use this more meaningful metric.
I really hope that Reiser4 will make it into the 2.6 kernel!
Too bad that most of such benchmarks (including this one) don´t include the perfomance of filesystems used in the *BSD family… I´d be interested in seeing how do reiserfs and ext3 stack up against UFS and UFS2 with softupdates.
“>> As with ext3, you don’t have to worry about data intriguity Is this correct?
If I were you, I would start worrying right now.
/me lost all data on his ext3 root partition 2 days ago
(just by a crashing XFree86 and resetting the system)”
Exactly the same thing happened to me just over a year ago – I switched to XFS and have had no problem since.
Odd I have been using ext3 on one workstation for over a year now myself.
I have never lost data and I have had a couple of power failures.
Even had my son pull the plug on the computer. No issues.
Odd. Though, I am beginning to come to the opinion now that I have used both that Reiserfs is really much faster.
/me lost all data on his ext3 root partition 2 days ago
(just by a crashing XFree86 and resetting the system)”
Exactly the same thing happened to me just over a year ago – I switched to XFS and have had no problem since.
ditto, except I switched to Reiser (and Mandrake, b/c Red Hat has piddly support for anything other than ext2/3)
You hear a lot of bad things about ReiserFS in the press, but has anybody ACTUALLY lost any data in recent versions of it?
also, is anybody working on a port of FreeBSDs UFS2 and soft updates? I’ve crashed XFree86 hard under FreeBSD several times before ($#@$#@$ing Cirrus onboard graphics chip) (once during a ‘make buildworld’) and never lost a single byte.
Are there technical barriers, i.e. the VFS layers are too different or just ideological ones… i.e. GPL vs BSD, Not Invented Here bull crap?
Well there is some bsd liecensed code in the Linux kernel as it is so i wouldn’t say there would be any problems using the code in FreeBSD as a basis of a Port, as long as the origin of the code is documented (origanal author etc.)
<boot> linux enable reiserfs
When you go to install RH it enables reiserfs support.
<boot> linux enable reiserfs
When you go to install RH it enables reiserfs support.
I’ll have to remember that next time I install Red Hat…does the same work for XFS as well? I know for a while SGI distributed a customized version of Red Hat to install it with XFS support, but that was only for Red Hat 8 as far as I know. Oh well, I could always just go try that out too…LOL
Anyway, thank you muchly!!!
Doesn’t work for XFS, but SGI does have a XFS install disk for 9 just like 8. I know linuxiso.org has it because I’ve used it a couple times.
**NOTE***
Severn beta doesn’t have the ReiserFS support???? Not sure why?
Doesn’t work for XFS, but SGI does have a XFS install disk for 9 just like 8. I know linuxiso.org has it because I’ve used it a couple times.
**NOTE***
Severn beta doesn’t have the ReiserFS support???? Not sure why?
Bummer…ohhh well, hopefully they put it in the final Red Hat 10…so far I’ve had nothing but a positive experience with ReiserFS (survived an XFree86 crash and an accidental poweroff) however, it would give me a great excuse to try XFS
Thanks again CybrJackle!
I use an ext3 filesystem on my laptop. And it has this Trident CyberBlade chipset in it that Trident likes to keep a secret. So mplayer and xine keep crashing the system whenever they try to use xvideo extensions. Anyway, I crash the thing all the time; it runs out of battery, only correctly resumes from a suspend half the time, and sometimes I just power the thing off when I can’t wait for it to shut down. It has never lost any data. And I’ve crashed the thing at least 50 times. Very reliable.
This is beautiful……I sooo cant wait for 2.6 + Reiser4. That will make my Gentoo on my barton system really scream. Ive been a big Reiser user for over a year and a half on all my desktops and servers with little to no issues. I like its performance. Reiser3 is right there with XFS and since XFS was designed for larger files Reiser made the most sense. Ext3 is plain dog slow IMO. I generally make /boot ext2 and keep it unmounted and the rest gets Reiser 🙂
Now all we have to do wait patiently for 2.6 + Reiser4 stable….BRING IT ON!!
i just can’t wait for 2.6 and resierfs. I’ve been wanting 2.6 to come out for the ALSA (built in) and reiserfs. I’ve been using ext3. Not that i notice a difference, but i’ve heard resierfs is schwweeet. Crosses fingers that it will soon come out.
I used an older version of Reiser that came with Mandrake 7.1 (I believe). It had been running on my server from March, 2001, until a couple of months ago when I built a new server and used FreeBSD 4.8.
I never had a single problem with Reiser, even though my server was killed a couple of times when we lost power and the UPS battery ran out. She always booted-up without a hitch and ran as usual.
I have Debian 3 unstable on a few systems, all of which are running Ext 3, also without a problem. I haven’t been running Ext 3 long enough to determine if it protects my data better than Reiser, but so far, so good.
For a long while since I switched back to Red Hat (starting with 7.3, from FreeBSD – before that was SuSE, before that was Mandrake, and before that was my first Linux experience on Red Hat 5.1) I was using Ext3 exclusively until I was made away that you can install using Reiserfs by booting with linux reiserfs or some such during install. Well, ext3 does fine but reiserfs certainly does feel faster. Nothing dramatic or night n day, but certainly noticable. Its most noticable on my older laptop with much more limited resources – reiserfs makes a hell of a difference when I only have 128 megs RAM on the thing. I always use Ext3 on my /boot but reisfer for everything else. Since I’ve discovered the XFS for RedHat ISO’s – thnx CybrJackle – I want to try that next.
Oh, and god damn I love 2.6test series….I’ll never use 2.4 again if I can help it. 😀
thats made aware, not made away…silly silly me.
Reiser4 does look to be an awesome filesystem, especially for the types of loads typical of a desktop or workstation machine. It is a huge step forward in filesystem implementation to be both fast *and* include data journaling.
PS> As for Reiser3, its a good FS. Its got excellent small-file performance (important for people who compile a lot) and recent versions are rather stable. I’ve been running a Reiser3 partition for about 6 months, and I have yet to experience any unusual data loss. I say unusual because I have lost several files during improper shutdowns (laptop battery giving out
, but that happens on all journaled FSs. A big step forward for Reiser4 is that it can guarantee the safety of file data as well!
I have had about 6 crashes this year in X with games and I have not lost data with ext3 either