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Reiser4 Filesystem Released
trixie_czech writes "It's finally arrived. Go to namesys for reasons to use reiser4 as a filesystem and benchmarks. Go here to download. Enjoy!" The Namesys homepage in its current stage reminds me of a cross between The Secret Guide to Computers and the GNU Manifesto -- which is to say, there is a lot to read here, not just a bullet-pointed feature list.
IF you can get to the site, you'll find this juicy reference at the end:
[NTFS]
"Inside the Windows NT File System" the book is written by Helen Custer, NTFS is architected by Tom Miller with contributions by Gary Kimura, Brian Andrew, and David Goebel, Microsoft Press, 1994, an easy to read little book, they fundamentally disagree with me on adding serialization of I/O not requested by the application programmer, and I note that the performance penalty they pay for their decision is high, especially compared with ext2fs. Their FS design is perhaps optimal for floppies and other hardware eject media beyond OS control. A less serialized higher performance log structured architecture is described in [Rosenblum and Ousterhout]. That said, Microsoft is to be commended for recognizing the importance of attempting to optimize for small files, and leading the OS designer effort to integrate small objects into the file name space. This book is notable for not referencing the work of persons not working for Microsoft, or providing any form of proper attribution to previous authors such as [Rosenblum and Ousterhout]. Though perhaps they really didn't read any of the literature and it explains why theirs is the worst performing filesystem in the industry....
Ok, so thats the standard response, but the main benefits will be stuff like: encryption plugins (so easy per directory encryption).. Finally maybe we'll have fully encrypted home directories easily. and stuff like the winFS system integrated into the filesystem possibly. its also 2X faster then reiserfs, and 4X faster then NTFS The big issue though is that until freebsd gets these benefits, apps aren't likely to get these capabilities :(
so maybe someone should work on porting this, then maybe theres a good chance these technologies will be used extensively..
It hasn't been my experience that ext2 or ext3 filesystems are more reliable than ReiserFS. At least, not where I work (I only run ReiserFS at home).
Over the past year, we've had some fairly serious filesystem failures on some of our DB and large FS servers. Ext3 on failed in every instance, Reiser was recoverable (similar RAID/hardware/useage/failure).
We pound the living hell out of our machines, day and night, with billions of small files every year. ReiserFS makes Linux work for us.
There are some instances where ReiserFS v3 is slower than Ext3, but we don't care about that any more. We're finished with Ext2/3, and are looking forward to testing ReiserFS4 now that it's been released.
1) Reiser destroyed Ext3 for directories with many thousands of files in them. However, now you say ext3 has btree hash dirs, probably minimizing the difference
2) Resier was much more space efficient if the average file sizes on the filesystem is very small (say, well under 4k). However, no *real* filesystems I found were like this.
3) The two were about the same in speed for large numbers of small reads and writes.
4) Ext3 was a bit faster for big sustained reads/writes. But it wasn't a huge difference and might not apply to Reiser4.
In short, Reiser4 was more robust to unusual filesystem usage, at a slight penalty to normal usage.
In fairness, this is because Ext has been around for so long, it is optimized for normal usage, and software is tailored not to step on the toes of Ext's deficiencies. For instance, to store huge numbers of small files, people usually use a database of some sort (even if only flat file). Reiser opens the possibility of simplifying life by replacing simple databases of small records with the filesystem; for instance, it might be practical for a Usenet newsreader to store every cached message in a separate file.
But for the most part, I think Reiser will stand on its new gee-whiz features (plugins), rather than raw performance, since there are so many filesystems with roughly comparable performance for normal usage scenarios. As with Longhorn's fancy new filesystem, the question is whether people really want feature-rich files.
Keep in mind that redhat kernels are highly patched and they don't apply reiserfs bugfix patches out of a deliberate policy to exclude them (yes, we offered to supply them but were rejected), so we don't recommend the use of redhat kernels for reiserfs, we recommend the official kernel, or the SuSE kernel.
RedHat are the guys that at one point shipped their kernel with REISERFS_DEBUG turned on just to make us look slow.....
I don't know why RedHat regards us as in the enemy SuSE camp just because we took money from SuSE, we would take money from RedHat too if it was offered....;-)
These distro rivalries are distasteful to me.
Hasn