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Interview With Reiser4 Author Hans Reiser
An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has an interesting interview with Hans Reiser, the author of two revolutionary Linux filesystems, Reiser3 and Reiser4. Reiser3 was the first journaling Linux filesystem. Reiser4 is a complete rewrite that is claimed to offer amazing performance and a new plugin architecture offering semantic enhancements to rival Microsoft's WinFS and Apple's Spotlight. Comparing Reiser4 to WinFS, Reiser says in the interview, "Reiser4 is a much more mature design, representing a 10 year effort"."
Comparing ReiserFS and WinFS is a bit like comparing Qt and Explorer - nonsensical. They're different things, operating at different levels, to serve different purposes.
Come on, how are the parties involved supposed to carry any credibility when making such a *basic* and *fundamental* misunderstanding - /WinFS is not a filesystem/. They also seem to misunderstand what Spotlight is - again comparing it as a filesystem, when it isn't.
Last time I used Reiser I had to reformat back to ext. The starving problem basically made the kernel freeze when flushing buffers during large streaming writes. Is the Large writes starve reads issue gone yet? When I say large I am referring to streaming 12 gig (hour of DV) in a continuous write.
James
The thread you link to nicely illustrates the political manoevering necessary to get a filesystem accepted into the kernel. This is one good reason why filesystems should be implementable in userspace.
There are so many wonderful things that can be done with filesystems once they can be added from userspace. How about transparently accessing files through SSH or FTP, from any application?
There are various tricks that allow filesystems to be implemented in userspace, such as LUFS and FUSE. Other filesystems (especially the ones that are portable to other systems) pretend to be NFS.
All of these suffer a performance penalty, but I wonder how much that really matters when you're interacting with disks or networks, which are very slow compared to the CPU and RAM anyway.
Many things besides filesystems would benefit from being implementable in userspace, but filesystems are what I personally have thought about most.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Normally you have to release something before it can mature. OTherwise its called development...
/how/ its structured, how devels will be able to use it, how we'll be architecting solutions with Reiser4 plugins, it'd be much appreciated.
Still waiting on that plugin system, thanks. Should be good though. No hurry, but if you could even begin to release some info on
-Lord "I hope I havent missed anything in all these years waiting" Myren
Actually I didn't see much immaturity. Okay Linus saying microsoft will get a files system right when hell freezes over seemed a little immature.
Frankly Reiser4 looks like a good project.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It is very stable already - I use it as the root filesystem on my laptops (mostly because laoptop disks are sooo slow and reiser4 mitigates this considerably).
/boot) on my main machine.
I have not suffered any problems whatsoever in more than a year. I have had power-cuts, battery problems, and even a few kernel panics and so forth due to ACPI bugs, and reiser4 hasn't lost a single file or even needed a fsck.
Not to mention that its fast as hell.
I still do make weekly backups though, since I don't trust the disk to survive very long - but I trust reiser4 enough to use it as my root fs (only other fs is ext2 for
One of the driving concepts behind ReiserFS is that metadata is nothing special, and it should be presented in the same namespace as the files themselves. If you read the article, it talks about using 'cat' and other simple tools to manipulate the metadata. Think something like 'cat /home/foo/music/some.mp3/artist' to display the person who performed a song.
It depends on the metadata. Think about file permissions. That's metadata. All the files you create are given defaults based on your umask, and you can go in and change them at any time.
In order to expose some of this metadata to the end-user in a GUI, yes, there will probably need to be some new UI work done. It doesn't all just magically work, it has to be presented to the end-user in some way that will make sense to them. So what I would expect is that the filesystem and plugins will be finished and done, and able to be manipulated by programs and shell scripts, and then it will take further work to integrate this metadata support into GUIs and file managers in a way that's useful to non-power-users.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Another thing I thought sounded cool was the ability to cat /home/foo/music/some.mp3/raw > /dev/dsp and the mp3 would just play by using a plugin that ran it through an mp3 library. This would allow application developers to just access file/raw rather than worrying about file types and conversions.
If I'm writing an image viewing program I no longer have to worry about hooks to libjpg, libungif, libpng, libevery image file type available. Let the OS care about file types and let applications deal with raw data and focus on interface rather than file types.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Well, that makes a lot more sense now, and surely the poster was just confused rather than malicious.
Linus and I disagree on this point, a pity that.