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?

[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.