Faster Boot Planned for ReiserFS Partitions

Nov 28, 2007

Under certain circumstances ReiserFS will check the whole filesystem on rebooting, although this is not actually necessary due to its journaling function. Kernel developers are currently discussing a patch that will accelerate the system launch.

Many distributions call the fsck -a command for every partition they use. In the case of ReiserFS the filesystem checks its complete structure which can cause long waits for large partitions. However, ReiserFS uses journaling that makes the check redundant.

Kernel developer Jeff Mahoney submitted a kernel patch that tells the kernel to count how often it has mounted a filesystem. The kernel will continue to store the last check time in the filesystem’s superblock. By default, the filesystem notifies the administrator if it has been mounted more than 30 times without checking, or if the last checks is over 180 days in the past. These values can be modified using the tunefs command which is included with the reiserfstools package.

Mahoney has proposed the patch that modifies both the ReiserFS subsystem and the matching user tools to the ReiserFS team via its mailing list. It is hard to say when the proposal will make the release version.

Related content

  • Reiserfs Experiencing Turbulent Updates

    When Jeff Mahoney sent in a bunch of patches for reiserfs, he assumed that the filesystem would be frozen in maintenance mode from that point on. Things turned out differently.

    more »
  • File systems

    Many users just opt for the defaults and don’t think about the file system when they install Linux. But if better performance is your goal, it pays to do some shopping.

    more »
  • ReiserFS Without Big Kernel Lock

    Even though reiserfs belongs to the veterans of journaling filesystems and established ext3 and ext4 as standard Linux filesystems, a new patch serves to markedly improve it.

    more »
  • Configuring Filesystems

    Although most Linux distributions today have simple-to-use graphical interfaces for setting up and managing filesystems, knowing how to perform those tasks from the command line is a valuable skill. We’ll show you how to configure and manage filesystems with mkfs, df, du, and fsck.

    more »
  • LINUX WORLD NEWS
    more »
comments powered by Disqus

Issue 41: Linux Shell Handbook 2021 Edition/Special Editions

Buy this issue as a PDF

Digital Issue: Price $15.99
(incl. VAT)

News

Tag Cloud

Administration Community Desktop Events Hardware Linux Linux Pro Magazine Mobile Programming Software Ubuntu Web Development Windows free software open source