[plug] Mandrake and the journaling FS

[Colin Rothnie]

Hi Phil, 
Given the echoing silence on this subject, I offer my brief experiences:
I have tried a test installation with Mandrake 7.1 & reiserfs and started
playing around with turning it off at the wall during large file copies etc.
The file partitions with reiserfs were very stable, requiring no "fsck"
fixing at all.  By default, the root partition is installed with the
standard Linux filesystem rather than reiserfs.  I was puzzled by this until
I wanted to boot a "rescue disk" and realised that if I had used reiserfs
for the root partition, I would have had to put a special kernel onto the
rescue disk.

I didn't try any speed trials, but from what I have read, there is little or
no speed penalty with the system.  It is much faster than ext2 when creating
lots of directories (eg creating a squid cache).

My feelings having played with it are that it is very good and that it, or
something like it, could well become the default file system for Linux in
the future.  My only misgivings were that moving to reiserfs means burning
many of the bridges with regard to low-level file system tools (such as the
ability to access the partition from a "standard" rescue disk).

Colin Rothnie