Dr. Tweedie: Well I can see where you are going with dynamic inodes, and the major modification to the filesystem, so I can begin to understand a bit your concerns there. In terms of enterprise reliability, I understand, however, having an "office recommended journaling filesystem", and allowing people to install ReiserFS as the root filesystem notwithstanding that recommendation, is two different things. I do hope that in the next release of RH Linux, the ability to install into ReiserFS root filesystems is inclusive to the distribution. Many vendors allow customers to install software in unsupported configurations. Allowing customers to install that way, does not mean that you have to support it. I am not operating in an enterprise environment (my laptop), thus my concerns are different. Therefore, I suppose I do not see why the option to do that (perhaps albeit with a warning message) is not there. I was not aware that devfs could be mounted from fstab! I will look into that. Very Respectfully, Stuart Blake Tener, IT3 (E-4), USNR-R, N3GWG Beverly Hills, California VTU 1904G (Volunteer Training Unit) stuart@bh90210.net west coast: (310)-358-0202 P.O. Box 16043, Beverly Hills, CA 90209-2043 east coast: (215)-338-6005 P.O. Box 45859, Philadelphia, PA 19149-5859 Telecopier: (419)-715-6073 fax to email gateway via www.efax.com (it's free!) JOIN THE US NAVY RESERVE, SERVE YOUR COUNTRY, AND BENEFIT FROM IT ALL. Sunday, January 13, 2002 4:38 AM -----Original Message----- From: Stephen C. Tweedie [mailto:sct@redhat.com] Sent: Monday, February 04, 2002 12:16 PM To: IT3 Stuart Blake Tener, USNR-R Cc: 'Stephen C. Tweedie'; ext3-users@redhat.com Subject: Re: 2GB of Waste? How can it be? Hi, On Mon, Feb 04, 2002 at 11:50:24AM -0800, IT3 Stuart Blake Tener, USNR-R wrote: > I understand that modifying ext2/ext3 absent backwards > compatibly is a big deal, but I think adding that function would be a > wonderful thing. Right now, ext3 is backwards AND forwards-compatible with ext2. You can take an existing filesystem and mount it as ext3; but you can also take the same filesystem and remount it after as ext2 if you want. In other words, you have a migration path back to the old stable code if the new code fails. Dynamic inodes would change the filesystem in really fundamental ways. There's no telling what the performance impact would be over time. It would NOT be possible to revert to old kernel code. That's the sort of change that we are very, very wary about making in the core ext3 code. If you want dynamic inodes, you can always run reiserfs. > I also would like to see RH 7.2 be able to install into a > ReiserFS filesystem (or any type of filesystem with Linux, Mandrake > allows this), and think it is somewhat arrogant of RedHat to disallow > that option in the installer. Red Hat is serious about enterprise reliability. When we were evaluating various filesystems for 7.2, we couldn't make reiserfs survive under load. ext3 we were able to make rock-solid. That was the prime factor in determining what the official recommended journaling filesystem would be for 7.2. (Note that reiserfs has had a lot of bugfixing since we froze for 7.2; Chris Mason has done an outstanding job of making sure that problems in the 2.4 reiserfs code get dealt with quickly and that changes get merged back.) > Notwithstanding that fact, I have made > ReiserFS work as my root partition, I just cannot get ReiserFS on RH 7.2 > to boot up when devfs=mount is used. I've no idea about devfs. I avoid it like the plague. Why can't you just mount devfs in fstab if you want it so much? Cheers, Stephen
