Linux Gets Two Journaling File Systems Next Week: Reiserfs is the faster!
Sep 6th, 20:58 UTC
The horses are leaving the gate! Journaling for the reiserfs file system ships next week.
It is twice as fast for large files as the other journaling file system (ext2)
shipping out for Linux Kongress, because it logs only the meta-data. 
Pereslavl-Zalessky, Russia.
There is a bit of a horse race going on in the Linux world to see who
can ship the fastest journaling file system first. Big corporations are hungry for journaling, and applying the
pressure to the Linux community to deliver. Ordinary users are sick of
waiting for their filesystems to fsck. It is one of the last few things keeping Linux out of widespread use in the big bucks file server markets.
Stephen Tweedie is leading the ext2 camp's foray into journaling, while Chris Mason is being joined by most of the entire reiserfs team in the last sprint to get journaling out the door.
The two leading edge file system rivals in Linux, reiserfs and ext2, are both shipping journaling for Linux Kongress in Germany. They have an important difference in their design though! Ext2 writes the data twice, while reiserfs writes only the meta-data twice, using more complex and sophisticated coding to double performance for large files. The ext2 camp may have rushed their code out a litte bit too fast.
Don't count ext2 out yet though, some time later Stephen Tweedie is also going to ship a meta-data only logging file system. The Reiserfs camp is also going to ship something they call reverse opportunistic wandering logs, employ page table remapping instead of memory copies, and add quite a witches brew of other future performance tweaks. A race it will be.
Meanwhile, the XFS camp from SGI has been issuing press releases but not code. One can only wonder what they are up to, and whether by the time they finish their announced plans to code merge with the VxFS file system from Veritas, they will still be relevant. The race is on, and the small players are moving fast.
Reiser@idiom.com
(Submitted by Dan Danilin of ReiserFS)
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