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Link is wrong, it should be http://www.devlinux.com/namesys which redirects you to http://www.namesys.com/.

Thimo
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For further details on Reiser FS, check out this page. Freshmeat links to it, but I'm not entirely certain it works (I can't bring it up from here).

Also note that the maker of the file system, Hans Reiser, is suing Microsoft for the information that he needs to market the filesystem to Windows users :)

My karma's bigger than yours!

Something that I consider very important was left out: ReiserFS. This year the filesystem really came into its own, and is shipping with both Linux Mandrake and SuSE Linux. It's by far the most mature of the journaling filesystems available, including XFS, JFS, and Tux2. It's also scheduled for inclusion in kernel 2.4.1. Surely this was accidentally left out? Just because it's commercially funded doesn't mean it's a bad product, and it is certainly GPLed.

Keep in mind before upgrading that if you're running ReiserFS (as you should be =) ), the latest 2.2.17 won't patch correctly, be it 2.2.18 + patch or 2.2.17 + patch + 2.2.18 patch. These should be out imminently, however, so keep an eye on their web site. Also, be sure to check out opensource.creative.com for the latest EMU10K1, as the drivers are far more recent than the ones included in 2.2.18, and a great bit better, I've found. This is definitely worth the upgrade, for no other reason than the USB backporting, as well as the AGPgart and DRI drivers.

I don't care in the slightest what proportion of that time involved:

• Doing a memory check
• Loading the OS
• Doing a "scandisk" because the system went down uncleanly
• Connecting to the network and identifying oneself to the corporate environment
• Starting up the "cash register" application

The point is that it took ten minutes from the time of pressing the power switch before the cashier was able to Enter My Order, which is, after all, the whole point of having the computer there.

And, as for the "journalling" issue, I have gotten myself a journalling filesystem, at least as far as metadata goes. I've been using ReiserFS for probably the last 18 months, thank you very much...

The central point of a journaling file system is that in exhange for a small hit in performance, file integrity is assured by an ingenious mechanism...

I hope this was not meant to imply that ReiserFS is slower than Ext2fs. Here are the ReiserFS benchmarks showing how it beats Ext2fs in virtually every category tested, a lot of times pretty convincingly. Also, I found Hans Reiser's Future Vision a pretty interesting read too.

The central point of a journaling file system is that in exhange for a small hit in performance, file integrity is assured by an ingenious mechanism...

I hope this was not meant to imply that ReiserFS is slower than Ext2fs. Here are the ReiserFS benchmarks showing how it beats Ext2fs in virtually every category tested, a lot of times pretty convincingly. Also, I found Hans Reiser's Future Vision a pretty interesting read too.

If Linus has a problem with ReiserFS, it is that he probably fears some of the exciting new ``disruptive'' concepts that Hans Reiser has planned. ReiserFS is truly innovative. For those interested in the innovations, there is a White Paper available. I'm sure that Hans Reiser's roadmap is what is scaring Linus. I'll be happy to see JFS make it into 2.4, but ResierFS deserves to be there too. I urge anyone with a slight interest to try out ReiserFS. I'm sure you'll agree then that it deserves a place at the table. I'm a late adaptor, and skeptical of new code (I used Xia FS for years after ext2 was available). If conservative old me can handle ReiserFS, anyone can.

I'm interested to some extent in XFS because, IIRC, it was optimized for insanely large files (like captured video streams). However, Reiserfs is already here today to serve all your journaling needs.

Head down to http://www.devlinux.com/projects/reis erf s/ and take a look. Its already included by default in the newer SuSE distributions.

If at all possible, I'd recommend getting some 64-bit hardware. Probably an Alpha-based system. Next, get a decent filesystem like ReiserFS or Global Filesystem.

If you are running on x86 hardware, there's not telling if the accesses will be capable of reading large files (>2GB).
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Ski-U-Mah!

though I always hate the 20 minute reboots to fsck 30GB of storage :-(

Try reiserfs. I run it on top of a 40G U2 hardware RAID-5, a 4G SCSI-1 hardware RAID-1 and a 30G linear software raid with no problems. fs integrity check takes < 3s.

All signs of sharing and cooperation are welcome. However, it seems to me that soon the Linux and BSD communities are headed to a de facto total divorce, although this will be denied for a while.

The instrument of this in my opinion will be the inclusion of ReiserFS as part of an official stable Linux kernel. From what I have read from various mailing lists such as those at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=reiserfs&r=1&w=2 and Debian, ReiserFS will only be licensed for free operating systems under the GPL. In my opinion this means that ReiserFS will never be part of the base distributions of the free source BSDs.

I believe that in five years ReiserFS will be the default file system for most Linux distributions. Of course ordinarily with Unix associated filesystems the particular one does not matter all that much for data interchangeability, but ReiserFS is but a small part of Hans Reiser's rather persuasive and exciting vision http://devlinux.com/projects/reiserfs/whitepaper.h tml. True right now there are many statements about how there will be upward compatible migration paths for different filesystems and even operating systems, but I see no way to avoid eventual nonportability of information between ReiserFS and other filesystems.

And that's when the total break will occur. ReiserFS is getting support right now from some of the heavyweights such as SuSE, which means that there will be a high degree of integration between ReiserFS and the distributions. Conversely if ReiserFS isn't part of the base free source BSD distributions, it will not enjoy those communities' professional quality integration efforts.

In my opinion the free source community would have been better off a while ago adopting a common stance for open implementable standards regardless of GPL, BSD, or MIT X licensing, but that window of opportunity of probably past.

Check out the work on

Placeless Documents
and

Hans Reiser's white paper on name spaces
. I find that stuff really interesting
and encouraging.

Hans Reiser was the project initiator, primary architect, supplier of funding, and one of the programmers. Some folks at times remark that naming the filesystem Reiserfs was egotistic. It was so named after a potential investor hired all of my employees away from me, then tried to negotiate better terms for his possible investment, and suggested that he could arrange for 100 researchers to swear in Russian Court that I had had nothing to do with this project. That business partnership did not work out.

Read the testimonials on the ReiserFS homepage.

A journaling filesystem is a very high profile Killer Feature. Having journaling in 2.4.0 would make Linux an even more obvious choice where data integrity is of paramount importance.

Lets start a grassroots movement to have ReiserFS merged with 2.4.0!

No, that's not the case...&nbsp See http://devlinux.com/projects/rei serfs/archive/9/34 for the issue that I'm talking about.

I'm not sure if it's been resolved.&nbsp I didn't see anything on their site that says it does work with NFS, nor did I see anything that says it doesn't.

So can somebody who's been following the issue a bit more closely please confirm?

According to their Business and Licensing page, they are under the GPL (however they also sell other licenses). This is the distinction. The BSD license (The old one) requires the "noxious dvertising clause". Under the GPL you can feel free to remove any advertising or modify it in any way you like, so long as you provide source with any released binaries.

In either case, you could really do anything you wanted to, even change the advertising to microsoft.com if it's something you're only using on your own.

I'm impressed. Reiser is a very nice journaling file system; it doesn't need more space than ext2fs and runs measurably faster. Check out ReiserFS at http://devlinux.com/projects/reiserfs/

It is my hope that it will prove a lot better integrated with Linux(-based GNU systems :-) than Coda. If it fulfills it promise, I have at least a hundred machines which I am looking to install it on.

Matthew.

Another nice thing is the filesystem of BeIA, which will be database like, and allows the users to create their own file types with special attributes. This, and the ability to search for specifially search for these attributes, the system will be suited very well for technical/scientifical applications, says Heise.

That sounds somewhat like BFS, the BeOS file system, as described in Practical File System Design with the Be File System. The BeIA file system may be BFS, or a variant thereof (the Be press release says "At the foundation of BeIA are a core set of system functions, leveraged from BeOS, which talk directly to the individual hardware designs.")

Section 4.8 "Attributes" of that book says that a file (or can have) associated with it a directory (not part of the normal directory hierarchy; the only reference to it is, presumably, via the file's inode), and in that directory are files that correspond to the file's attributes, with the name of the attribute being the name of the file and the value of the attribute being the contents of the file. They later added a mechanism to store small attributes in the inode itself.

(ReiserFS might obviate the need for such a mechanism, although, from the stuff on ReiserFS, having a separate name space for attributes might be considered an anathema.)

BFS also supports indices of attributes, allowing searches for files with particular attributes.

Basically he asks contributing hackers to sign ownership of the code over to him. He makes all code available through the GPL, but sells exceptions to commercial OS vendors.

You can find the business model and licensing here.

XFS
Originally made by SGI for their IRIX OS, XFS is one awesome filesystem. Read this white paper (http://www.sgi.com/Technology/xfs -whitepaper.html). This white paper describes all of its cool features. The main features of XFS make it a super scalable, very reliable, ultra fast journalling filesystem utilizing many cool FS technologies like B-trees and other cool stuff.

Unfortunately, it seems that currently there are many problems with the Linux implementation of XFS. I don't know any details of this, but I guess it is safe to say that XFS will some day become available for Linux. This would be great.

ext3fs
I've only read about this in the linux mailing lists. ext3 appears to be a standard ext2fs implementation with journalling data, allowing backward compatibility with ext2, although one of the authors hinted that they may not make it backwards compatible in some later version. It is currently in super early alpha testing and definately not anywhere close to usable, stable and reliable.

In my opinion this project is very new, and holds much promise. From their README, they appear to be done basic journalling code, and what remains to be done is error handling contingencies, metadata only journalling, performance tuning and lots of other coding. As a result, it may take some time but this could hold much promise and give another viable option for a journalling FS for Linux. Choices are always good.

Ext3 Site - ftp://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/linux/sct/f s/jfs/

Reiserfs - http://devlinux.com/namesys/
I've been following reiserfs for a few months now. Its actually been available for quite some time now as a very stable, reliable and quick filesystem for Linux, but it was only recently when journalling was added to the code. Apparently this new addition is supposed to make it faster.

In "releasing" reiserfs, SuSE doesn't mean that it is the first journalling filesystem for Linux. It is the first journalling FS for Linux to be dubbed reliable and suitable for normal use. This is great as journalling has long been a stumbling block for enterprise adoption of Linux. Alan Cox hinted that he may include reiserfs in the standard kernels soon. Excellent =)

Warren Togami
warren@togami.com

Please everyone go to Reiser home page where the official anouncement is...
http://devlinux.com/namesys/
MP3.com is sponsoring a large part of the Reiserfs development...

ReiserFS was developed by a team led by (surprise!) Hans Reiser. Check out NAMESYS for more info.

Scott

linux-2.2.11-reiserfs-3.5.5-journaling-beta.gz

This is the most recent code, even though it is not in beta any longer. The journaling portion of the ReiserFS site has links and more information:

http://www.devlinux.com/projects/reiserfs/jrnl

-chris

• Apply linux-2.2.11-reiserfs-3.4.gz to pure linux 2.2.11 with `zcat linux-2.2.11-reiserfs-3.5.gz | patch -p0`
  
  
• Do 'cd /usr/src/linux/fs/reiserfs/utils; make dep; make; make install' to make the utilities.

Quoth Namesys' technical introduction:

This project is GPL'd, but I sell exceptions to the GPL to commercial OS vendors and file server vendors.

Seems like you'd have to derive your own version of GPL in order to not break the original by yourself - unless it already makes this possible. Well, I guess I should read it myself before making comments like this :P

An interesting situation will arise if reiserfs or major parts of it will be applied in Linus' kernel releases or optionally patched into distributions. Namesys' effort to fund itself with its GPL'd code might fail, if their product gets provided implicitly. Practically and hopefully this might be solved by RedHat et al striking a deal with Namesys. However it's a stretch of the spirit of GPL to assume a reward although the code is free. This kind of self-funding free development should be supported, but is it really? Or am I so mislead that I should just bury my nose to the dear old source of GPL?

Anyone shed some light on this fundability vs. GPL issue?

Dear Mr AC (no, not you Natedog!):
It's a long paper, so just skip all that boring file system stuff, and go here.

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It seems ext3 will have good competition even without XFS. For example reiserfs will be integrated to the kernel in near future.