[mythtv-users] What is the problem with ReiserFS that makes it unsuitable for MythTV?

[Ryan Steffes]

On Tue, Feb 5, 2008 at 2:17 AM, Scott Alfter <mythtv at salfter.dyndns.org> wrote:
> While chasing down problems with corrupted recordings (most commonly with HD
>  recordings over FireWire from my cable box, though the odd PVR-500 recording
>  gets glitchy too), I decided to try switching to a different filesystem.  I
>  googled for "best filesystem for mythtv" and got the MythTV installation howto,
>  which I hadn't checked in ages.
>
>  I'm currently copying everything to a USB-connected hard drive that serves as
>  my long-term video storage before I reformat the drive with the MythTV video
>  files.  I checked to see what filesystem it's currently using...turns out it's
>  ReiserFS 3.6.  Turns out the howto has this warning:
>
>    NOTE: You must not use ReiserFS v3 for your recordings. You will get
>    corrupted recordings if you do.
>
>  There's also mention of ReiserFS having problems dealing with large files, but
>  mention of it is lumped in with FAT (which doesn't support large files at all).
>     I know ext3 takes a long time to delete large files, which is why I didn't
>  use it for MythTV storage (though I use it for the root and boot filesystems).
>   ReiserFS doesn't appear to have that problem at least, and you can create
>  large files in it.  What other things could there be about ReiserFS that
>  warrant the aforementioned notice that I've previously missed?
>
>  I'm on the fence as to whether to go with JFS or XFS (just compiled both as
>  modules and added the relevant mkfs/fsck/etc. tools).  I've tried JFS in the
>  past...seem to recall it was usually OK, though it sometimes needed to be
>  manually fsck'd to get it running right after a reset or power outage.  I don't
>  think I've ever used XFS for anything.  Which of these would be the better way
>  to go?
>

I don't know if this is still the case, but ReiserFS recently had some
bugs that caused the file system (and through it, the kernel) to hard
lock when writing lots of very large files.  It was what the
developers considered a very rare case, until of course MythTV users
started complaining it was a very common case.  They had some patches
out to fix it, but they didn't fully work for me, and I went to XFS.