What is ReiserFS ?
ReiserFS is a fast journaling file system with optimized disk space utilization and quick crash recovery. ReiserFS has been developed to a great extent with the help of Novell. ReiserFS is commercially supported only on Novell SUSE Linux. Recently Reiser4 has been released which is going to be the successor to the ReiserFS file system but still not widely adopted in many of the Linux distributions due to lack of coding standards.
Creating ReiserFS filesystem
All you need to do is to install centOS-plus kernel and reiserfs-utils in your server before proceeding with the setup. For more details click here to know about the centos-plus packages and setting up the yum repos. On my another post i have explained how to create Linux partition using fdisk. Download the centos-plus kernel from http://isoredirect.centos.org/centos/5/centosplus/ install and reboot the server with the new kernel. If you are getting mount: unknown filesystem type ‘reiserfs’ which means that your kernel does not support the reiserfs file-system and it will resolve if you install the centos-plus kernel which has the reiserfs support in-build.
Install the reiserfs-utils
- # yum install reiserfs-utils
After installing the rpm, format the new partition using mkfs.reiserfs (For example on /dev/sda7)
- # /sbin/mkfs.reiserfs /dev/sda7
And the output looks some what similar to the following.
mkfs.reiserfs
Setting label for reiserFS partition
Use the reiserfstune command to setup the label for the new partition which you have created.
- # /sbin/reiserfstune -l newpartition /dev/sda7
Edit the /etc/fstab using your favorite text editor and add the following lines.
/dev/sda7 /newpartition reiserfs 1 2
Finally mount the new partition on the directory with the directory
- # mount /newpartition
Once mounted execute the mount command and make sure that the new partition mounted filesystem is /dev/sda8 on /newpartition type reiserfs (rw)