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"."

Comments

Re:Interface to metadata?

[Bogtha]

Well, what I want to know is: How do I get to this metadata? Some extra tool?

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.

Some right-click option that I have to select every time I create a file?

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.

Re:Interface to metadata?

[ArsonSmith]

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.