Section 9.4. ReiserFS

9.4. ReiserFS

The ReiserFS file system has enjoyed popularity among some desktop distributions such as SuSE and Gentoo. As of this writing, Reiser4 is the current incarnation of this journaling file system. Like the ext3 file system, ReiserFS guarantees that either a given file system operation completes in its entirety or none of it completes. Unlike ext3, Reiser4 has introduced an API for system programmers to guarantee the atomicity of a file system transaction. Consider the following example:

A database program is busy updating records in the database. Several writes are issued to the file system. Power is lost after the first write but before the last one has completed. A journaling file system guarantees that the metadata changes have been stored to the journal file so that when power is again applied to the system, the kernel can at least establish a consistent state of the file system. That is, if file A was reported has having 16KB before the power failure, it will be reported as having 16KB afterward, and the directory entry representing this file (actually, the inode) properly records the size of the file. This does not mean, however, that the file data was properly written to the file; it indicates only that there are no errors on the file system. Indeed, it is likely that data was lost by the database program in the previous scenario, and it would be up to the database logic to recover the lost data if recovery is to occur at all.

Reiser4 implements high-performance "atomic" file system operations designed to protect both the state of the file system (its consistency) and the data involved in a file system operation. Reiser4 provides a user-level API to enable programs such as database managers to issue a file system write command that is guaranteed to either succeed in its entirety or fail in a similar manner, thus guaranteeing not only that file system consistency is maintained, but that no partial data or garbage data remains in files after system crash.

For more details and the actual software for ReiserFS, visit the home page referenced in Section 9.11.1 at the end of this chapter.