Dr. Tweedie: Make no mistake, in the comparison of ReiserFS V3 and EXT3, I would use EXT3 if all things (in terms of space) were equal. Now, I would also reserve the right to reevaluate the situation when ReiserFS V4 comes out, but then I imagine that EXT3 (JFS, as well as XFS) will also have advanced in terms of their capabilities too. I do hope the tail packing can be made to work with EXT3, for laptop users it can mean a lot of space if you have many small files stored. If a matter of space is equal between EXT3 and ReiserFS V3, then EXT3's ability to do logging of data as well as metadata (from my point of view) provides features more attractive to me, then ReiserFS V3. 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. Monday, February 04, 2002 7:55 PM -----Original Message----- From: Stephen C. Tweedie [mailto:sct@redhat.com] Sent: Monday, February 04, 2002 4:29 PM To: Bryan J. Smith Cc: stuart@bh90210.net; ext3-users@redhat.com Subject: Re: 2GB of Waste? How can it be? Hi, On Mon, Feb 04, 2002 at 07:13:12PM -0500, Bryan J. Smith wrote: > But even if you still consider it "essential," then XFS is a > _even_better_alternative_ to ReiserFS V3! In addition to its > dynamic inode allocation, XFS can store a small file's data in its > inode, for space savings (i.e. doesn't use a data block). ReiserFS > still requires you to eat a 4KB (or whatever the basic size is) data > block, No, reiserfs allows you to store the last non-block-aligned tail part of a file in the tree nodes themselves, rather than taking up a whole block. Reiserfs does definitely give you good small-file efficiency as a result. There are tail-merging patches for ext2 to do the same, btw. We've been looking at whether that can be adapted for ext3 extended attributes --- if so, we can get ext3 tails stored in an EA and achieve the same sort of space efficiency that reiserfs gains with its own tail merging. Cheers, Stephen
