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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
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).
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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