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Rewritten ReiserFS 4 Promises 2-5x Speed Increase
An anonymous reader reports that version 4 of "ReiserFS will be released in first quarter. Complete rewrite will support Atomic writing. 2-5 times faster. File corruption will be a thing of the past. Lindows.com is paying for part of it."
Distros don't offer it during installation for a few usual reasons:
1) no mainline kernel acceptance
2) known data corruption issues
3) Hans Reiser himself has said they're beta and not quite production yet, but will be soon
Agreed. I use reiserfs on all my Slackware boxen, have for a while now. (Slackware does offer reiserfs during install.)
So will reiserfs 4 require a 2.6 kernel, or will those of us using 2.4 be able to use it? Also, does it require a re-format, or can you upgrade a v3 FS to v4?
Ron Paul 2012
As another example, Lindows also supports KDE-Look (a KDE desktop theming site) which IIRC couldn't pay for its hosting until Lindows sponsored them.
Anyway, it's nice to know that a pay-only Linux distribution is still contributing to the community (though I do not use Lindows either).
For a quick explanation, WinFS is a FS on top of SQL Server (a dbms). It will allow stored procedures to be invoked, just like a dbms and is now updatedable remotely.
ReiserFS is still a journalFS that is similar in nature to an Apple fork (ability to store keyword/values for attributes). It has procuderes that can be invoked based on read, write, readdir, writedir, open, and close. Security is still handled normal, so only those with permission can change the functions.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Everything I read about WinFS sounds like a blatant rip-off of BeFS (The BeOS's filesystem)'s featureset.
BeFS was database-driven and had all kinds of great querying features, could support files of over a petabyte (I forget exactly how big that is), had fixed-size blocks rather than a fixed-count, and I believe it was journaled, too. That was back, when? 1995? 1996?
I bet M$ is glad Be went down, now they don't have to worry about infringing on patents (if BeFS WAS, in fact, patented). Or does Palm own that, now? Or whoever bought all their IP.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
File and filesystem corruption is never a thing of the past. You can mitigate their effects, but no amount of filesystem robustness will fully protect you against failing hardware. Please don't make false advertisements regarding F[L]OSS projects.
Mostly that was several dozen mail spool files. Didn't I switch to a journaled file system in part to avoid this sort of thing? Grrrrrrrrrr.
>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;
No you didn't. Usually journaled file systems only protect metadata integrity. So files will get corrupt, but entire directory trees will never suddenly dissapear. This is true of all journaled filesystems, even high-end ones like VxFS or XFS. Some filesystems (like ext3 and reiserfs) offer data journaling in addition to regular journaling, but at a significant speed hit. Data journaling is usually disabled by default, except in ext3.
The new Reiser4 will support atomic file operations naturally, at the full speed of the filesystem. As a result, you can get the benifets of data journaling without the performance hit.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
ReiserFS is good because it uses advanced algorithms and such that I will never understand to increase the speed at which harddrives (or usb solid state devices...) can read and write data at the cost of processor utilization. This is good because
A) Processors have been increasing in speed much more quickly than hard-drives, so this tradeoff can lead to a more balanced system.
B) Hard-drive read/write speeds can have a lot more impact on the speed of a computer than people realize. When large programs (Open Office, etc.) take a long time to load up it makes a computer seem slow, and the general mentality is that the solution to a slow computer is to get a faster processor. Sometimes when I'm booted in Windows XP i'll be running a lot of programs simultaniously and the computer will seriuously bog down, so I'll three finger salute and look at my running processes, only to find that my cpu is idle. I'll then look over to see my HD activity LED constantly lit.
On the other hand, one of the Cons of using ReiserFS is that it eats up CPU cycles. It probably doesn't make sense to use it on an older (Pentium I/II) computer because the gain in Hard Drive speed will be overshadowed by the lost processor cycles, although 2.6's new kernel pre-empting code would probably help a lot with this problem.
There are also reports of file corruption, so it might not be a good idea on a server that can't afford down time to restore a backup.
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