Filesystems, Disks and Memory

As i'm sure you all know, ext2 (and then ext3) is the most widely used linux fs... but some distros (SUSE & Debian) are now chosing to either use by default, or at least give the option of using ReiserFS.

What is it about ReiserFS that's so great exactly? I understand that it has a limitless number of inodes, but surely there's more to it than this, right?

Also, just out of interest, are there any other fs types that other distros are using apart from ext[2,3] and reiserfs?

Check it out for yourself: http://www.namesys.com/

ah, thank you! by the look of it, a truly great fs!

Heh.. dangerous thread here... According to our rules:
(8) No BSD vs. Linux vs. Windows or similar threads.
and really that is what this will ultimately come down to. Some discussion is possible, but after that we may close the thread.

ext2 is clearly not ready for prime time. Without journalling, a filesystem can't really compete today. ReiserFS offered journalling first and some distros switched to it. Other stuff was large file and volume support. ext3 finally came out and possibly surpassed ReiserFS. Between ReiserFS and ext3 reasonable minds can disagree. Development is continuing on both. Both have supporters who make various claims. Making ReiserFS a default is a way for one Linux distro to distinguish itself all the others. Considering that they all run the Linux kernel with GNU utilities, thats not real easy to do. And you can't flip-flop back and forth without alienating everyone.

Perhaps neither will "win" and ReiserFS/ext3 will join HP-UX/SunOS and Suse/Redhat and all the other muliple choices we have. It seems a little wasteful, but the competition is actually very healthy.

Sun did some benchmarking... see: this paper (PDF file).

Namesys has released Reiser4. This is fairly impressive!

apologies for the potentially dangerous thread... i really meant this topic to be a discussion about reiserfs i guess... i know enough about ext3 already (i think), so without comparing necessarily, i'd just like to know more about reiser

Also, a little comparison is needed, as i'm sure you agree, in order for us people to make educated decisions regarding things like which fs to use etc... i can appreciate the potential can of worms this could become though, so i'm not gonna be offended if this does get closed.

Well, with that contribution to our knowledge base I guess we can close the thread now.