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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"."
Berkeley was a lot better than junior high school, but it still involved homework, which deep down in my heart I could never believe in.
I hear you. I always avoided homework as much as possible too.
Bradley Holt
I was wondering over the weekend, on a whim, whether it would make sense to create a cross-platform library that abstracts meta-data/search functionality. Like, it would provide one uniform set of utility functions, and this would turn into calls to WinFS on windows, calls to Spotlight on OS X, and calls to ReiserFS on Linux.
;)
But I don't know enough about WinFS OR Spotlight Or ReiserFS to know if this would be even remotely useful or is just nonsense
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Having other people agree with him?
Does that actually exist?
I thought It was dead...
Let's try to keep our comparisons to real entities...
I am Hans, and this is Franz, and we want to [clap] journal your filesystem.
Ya. Ya. All you little girly men with your FAT and NTFS!
Really, Ya. Makes me sad to see such pathetic file systems!
How does the performance of Reiser4 compare to that of Reiser3, XFS, JFS, EXT2/3, UFS, UFS2, etc., in quantitative terms, for various applications?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Journalled filesystems are so 90s. Everyone is raving about how the new whizbang filesystems of the 21st century are going let you do metadata searches, and harken back to the beloved (?) BeOS. Well, what I want to know is: How do I get to this metadata? Some extra tool? Some right-click option that I have to select every time I create a file? Will all File dialog boxes have to be rewritten, and will I have to manually input all this info?
I'm happier with Google desktop, which can, effectively, search many types of my files, and has a relatively familiar interface (for all but RMS).
Once there's an application which can find all pictures of my dog, or songs with piano in them, and store THAT in the metadata, which I can search somehow, call me. Otherwise I'll stick to ext3fs and NTFS.
Wake me when the revolution starts.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Here's a link to the page that hides the asshats making the pages super-wide with lame comments.
Anything more specific? I'm the first to admit that he can be rather immature, spoiled and inflammatory but a quick look at the link you offered showed none of these attitudes. Actually the discussion sounded quite civilized, so what's the problem?
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
If benchmarks are even halfway legit, then this is indeed something amazing.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.
I definitely don't want to get into an argument of "He said/she said" here, but after looking at that link I don't see anything about the maturity of a ten-year-old. If anything, I wasn't too fond of someone saying that *anything* "had no place in Linux".
I've been waiting until it's deemed "safe" to use, but it seems it's going on 2 years now or "not ready yet". I know it's ready when it's ready, but is there a timetable for it? I don't have a fast enough spare box to test it out, and I want to dig the faster FS perf on an SATA harddrive. Keep going Hans!
bad_outlook
--
Is this vague enough for you?
I recently switched a laptop from Linux with ReiserFS3 filesystems to FreeBSD 5.4 using UFS2 filesystems. The size of the filesystems were the same, and the usage pattern (program development, web browsing, etc.) the same.
The UFS2 filesystems had the feel of being quicker than the ReiserFS3 filesystems. That said, I do not have any numerical data to back this up. However, untarring a large tarball consisting of many smallish files under FreeBSD felt quicker than doing the same under Linux.
Would this difference be caused by the filesystems themselves, or would it most likely be a difference between the Linux and FreeBSD IO subsystems? Would ReiserFS4 be more comparable, if not better than, FreeBSD's UFS2 for workstation-style workloads?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
XFS beta came out 9/22/2000 (its source code was first publically available on 3/30/2000) The first journaling version of reiserFS was release in november of 1999.
JFS came later than XFS though I can't find the date.
Of course officially ext3 came out before reiserFS in september of 1999, though ext3 is the real winner. Which produced workable code first I have no idea.
I was trolling.
The german magazine iX ran benches on Reiser4 a while ago, and the benchmarks indeed were impressing with two huge downsides however, one is already mentioned in the interview, a reallocator is needed because Reiser4 has a tendency to fragment. And the other one being a much higer CPU usage than every other filesystem.
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.
Now having read all of the ML discussion in the link GP posted I still don't see how it shows Reiser's immaturity. He may be a bit overconfident about his ideas but that's not necessarily a bad thing. That said I wanted to add that the link is a very good read and it is about features of Reiser4 that may be more important than raw speed (especially raw speed according to benchmarks on Reiser's own homepage =).
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Is there any information on reliability, though? Saving a few seconds copying files is great, but if I end up losing data after a power failure it's not much use.
Personally, I've found ext3 to survive crashes the best: xfs, jfs and reiser have all lost me data.
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
It's an INTERVIEW with the system's author and he's giving his opinion. Which, come to think of it, is what one DOES in an interview, you know, ask someone what they think? Sheesh.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
My understanding is that the kernel developers have pointed out flaws in the benchmarks and he has accepted the criticisms but points out that they are just benchmarks and all benchmarks have flaws. This would not be a problem if he didn't keep referring to the benchmarks when trying to ram a change into the kernel. You can't have it both ways.
It's also my understanding that the key reason kernel developers don't want to accept his patches is that they don't like big megapatches that affect many systems or replicate functionality that is already in the kernel -- it's bad for maintenance. It's also my understanding that he doesn't want to break up the patches himself and he has refused help from others who are eager to do it for him. For him, it's an all or nothing deal -- take it or leave it. The kernel developers say "fine, we'll leave it", but he doesn't accept their decision and continues to complain. Again, you can't have it both ways.
Reiser may be a genius, but even geniuses have to (*gasp*) live in the real world and negotiate with real people. Even if Reiser is smarter than all the kernel developers (doubtful), it pays to treat your so-called "inferiors" with respect. Even janitors and garbage collectors can have wisdom that we don't have and things they can teach us.
Personally, I've found Reiser to be the best. I've lost data on ext2 and ext3, as well as jfs (and reiser, once). Overall, I've also lost weeks of time waiting for ext to fsck on an "unscheduled" reboot. :)
;)
Of course, this is moot since none of them will regularly lose files, and anything important is regularly backed up. Not to mention that a single UPS to weather minor power interruptions costs under $100... Right?
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.
I really would like a metadata driven system. Instead of the traditional file dialog for saving or opening files it would be cool to just specify some metadata and have it thrown on a heap of files. I think this is kind of what winFS is trying to accomplish, but above the filesystem level. Hopefully that is in the future of every OS. And if not, or is some better idea comes along, then I guess some time in the future I will pick up a database implementation book and a file systems book, study up and work on it myself.
"Reiser4 ... representing a 10 year effort"
obligatory comment:
by the time longhorn (vista?) is released, it too will be a 10+ year effort.
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
He struck me as having a disdain for authority and a dislike of hierarchy for the sake of hierarchy. I would think he's highly creative with a touch of genius. The proof is in his filesystem.
I'm much the same way -- well, except I'm a dumbass.
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.
People who think they need to implement spotlight, HFS+ xattrs or Reiser should read Practical FileSystem Design (pdf) then just go away and use BeFS instead. :-)]
[Actually, the person who implemented HFS+ xattrs and worked in the Spotlight team was the guy who wrote Practical FileSystem Design, so I think that counts
There are 2 other significant players in the FS field that Hans doesn't mention:
XFS (from SGI) and GPFS from IBM.
GPFS has a different focus, but XFS seems to be aimed at solving similar problems as ReiserFS (scalability, high performance, journaling).
Simpy
It was not Hans who wrote that, it was Linus in response to Hans' claims that Reiser4 is important because it can compete with WinFS and Spotlight.
Yeah, that's not a good link. Try this kerneltrap one. Things have been brewing. I haven't kept up with the most recent stuff, though.
;) If I butchered anybody's perspective, please correct me. I don't do kernel dev or psychology.
It's really a design/people issue. There are the lingering issues of stability and similar, but these are not (as I understand) the original problem.
Reiser4 incorporates some sophisticated metadata concepts ("semantics") that are in effect a software layer over the fs - which is why Hans can compare it to WinFS. Some of these features step into the functionality domain of the VFS and the kernel. Not a bad thing, per se.
Now, we all know the stereotypical kernel dev - technically conservative, concerned about maintenaince, not really keen on making big compromises, and annoyed by ego (again, a stereotype). Keep that in mind.
Hans of course wants Reiser4 into the kernel. What's the holdup (from a technical design standpoint)? Well, individuals like Andrew Morton want functionality in the kernel that can be reused in a file-system nuetral fashion. Reiser4 has a plugin system, but it's a Reiser4 plugin system. Reiser4 and Hans want to extend Linux as an API, which right now will just be for Reiser4.
There are also some lingering details of how this will change the course of filesystem integration in the kernel, in regards to traditional POSIX and Unix-like behavior. I don't recall any enduser problems, but there are few complaints.
Why might this be annoying? Well, Hans wants his fs into the kernel now and he makes the case of its superiority, the markets demand, and the need to compete with companies like Microsoft. I wouldn't be the one to tell kernel devs that they need to compete with MS, but Hans is - to say the least - confident. And he did name the filesystem after himself, so I'm not how this couldn't be personal on some level.
The middle ground is to say to Hans: we'll take Reiser4, but we want these Reiser-only features to be ultimately modified for all capable filesystems. Hans insists - and I'm sort of generalizing here - that the details can be sorted out, but right now we should go with Reiser4 and not worry about making it anything but a great fs.
So, Hans took a "assertive" position on why Reiser4 should not only be included in the Linux kernel but also change the kernel. Linus, Morton, and a few others took a stand and said - in so many words - "Hans, we aren't putting your ego into our kernel. Not even experimental."
It would be interesting to see if end users put enough momentum behind Reiser4 to put in into mainline or start it in 2.7.
Is that worth a few flames?
but it is horrible for a large networked filestore. The heirarchies that the secretaries at work come up with are convoluted at best, and it takes a long weekend to even attempt to comprehend the logic of their naming convention. When they lose a file, or forget what it was named, when they last worked on it, but can tell you that it was an ISO file (which in itself is ironic), coupled with the fact that they often change the file extensions on their files to random numbers, or try to change it to .pdf to save it as a pdf file, metadata makes a lot of sense.
You also seem to be mixing up the issue of microkernels and monolithic kernels. Apple's OS X uses a microkernel, but the operating system is still monolitic, so all the important stuff is still part of a single big process; the microkernel is basically just an abstraction layer. Hurd is a microkernel but uses multiple servers, so all the subsystems are separate.
And /. is not one monolitic entity either.
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
I never said the above words attributed to "Rieser".
I am sure of it becuase I would absolutely never say that "Linux kernel developers do what's right because it is _right_, not because somebody else does it.".
I am just not that nice a guy that I would say such a thing.:-/ I am guilty of saying the opposite at various times. I am known for this, and not particularly liked for it.:-)
This is a forged quote. Note the false defensiveness put into it in the sentence "So there's really no point in trying to push your agenda by trying to scare people with MS activities." That really sounds like someone at MS posted this.
It does not matter so deeply that MS put it into or out of the kernel, what matters is how they layered the code relative to itself --- that is, do they use the FS API, which lacks an insert or excise operation, to repack small objects that they squished together within a file, and does that layering make things slow. I think it almost certainly does make it slow, and it definitely is inelegant.
Hans Reiser
Reiser4 Architect
Namesys
Over the past several years, we had pretty good luck with using Reiser on root and data filesystems. Good luck in the sense that we never encountered something we couldn't recover from. However, we did have more than one instance of filesystem corruption that would crash the kernel (We used it on several of our development servers). The warnings on the 'rebuild tree' utility weren't very reassuring, but it always seemed to work. We also had instances of corrupt files by sticking random bits of data of other files at the end.
I'm migrating our servers slowly over to ext3 as we upgrade them, mainly because it is more mainstream and I prefer my source code sunny side up as opposed to scrambled. I noticed that the same number of files seems to take up less room (10% or so?) on the disk overall with Reiser than with Ext3 (as reported by df).
ayershome.org/users/eric
Also, a lot of the truly great programmers of our age have had personality flaws.. possibly a degree of autism-like inability to interface to other people is symptomatic of the mindset that understands computer systems. God knows, we geeks face dumber forms of that assumption every day!
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I've been thinking about starting up a file system project (as you do), and was wondering if anyone has thought of using something like the FUSE kernel module with a database (say MySQL or Berkeley DB) to create an easily indexible file system. The idea is to create a basic proof of concept using FUSE and if it gets any interest turn it into a proper (kernelspace) FS.
What sort of problems can I expect to face?
Ah that's hilarious, ok, yeah, it was Linus saying it. Apologies for not remembering and thinking it was someone at MS.:-))) Can't imagine why the poster put my name on it though.....
Hans Reiser
Those are the words of Linus Torvalds in response to someone suggesting that Reiser4 should be merged, in order to stay competetive with WinFS and Spotlight. To counter the reasoning, Linus Torvalds stated the following seperate points:
1. WinFS is not the real filesystem, the real filesystem (NTFS) still runs in kernel mode. WinFS is "merely" a set of libraries in user-space, like gnome-storage. So, you can't derive a need to push such functionality into the Linux kernel.
2. Trying to push some functionality into the kernel with the reason to compete with Microsofts development won't work, because they do what they think is right, not in order to compete with someone else.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
The topic in channel #gentoo-amd64 on irc.freenode.net has said "Reiser4 is evil" for more than a year. Does anyone know if Reiser4 actually works in a x86_64 environment?
Now, we all know the stereotypical kernel dev - technically conservative, concerned about maintenaince, not really keen on making big compromises, and annoyed by ego
You make that sound like a bad thing!
I'm not a kernel developer, but as a professional software engineer I do know that conservative development is the best policy. Users tend to want the opposite unfortunately. They don't care how rotten and worm-ridden the inside of the apple is, so long as the outside is bright and shiny.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Not really looked at GPFS, but if IBM's history is anything to go by (JFS, M:N threading, the DAISY code translator, etc) it'll be revolutionary, be an inspiration to a thousand projects, and get forgotten as it is overtaken.
Sad, but true - IBM has done masses for Linux, in terms of proof-of-concpet, forcing the pace and introducing new idead. Unfortunately, they then drop the ball. It hasn't mattered much, as others have gone running with the ideas, but it would be nice if IBM saw a real return on their investment by keeping on until their technology is adopted.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
last week, I formatted my new USB hard drive with reiser4. It works well with both 32 and 64 bit (kernel and userspace), no problems so far.
I just come from a time and place where being objective and modest about your own trade or art speaks far stronger than unmodest self-PR work.
Having read the entire interview, I found nothing in it that made me think of Hans Reiser as engaged in unmodest self-PR work. Contrary to the tiny snippet you quoted, he doesn't slate WinFS. He says that it is doing interesting work. Nor is it particularly immodest to say that his file system is considerably more mature when he's spent almost 10 years more on it than the other.
Reading the article, the parts that you consider immodest seem to me, to be just sincere enthusiasm for his work. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Contrary to the title being "no one cares", I think the replies so far show that people do.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
More CPU % time is used because Reiser4 is faster. What should be compared is the overall CPU power needed for a filesystem operation. And even if reiser4 is really using more CPU, remember that the CPU power is growing much faster than hd speed.
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
The quote is genuine, but it is from Linus Torvalds. Gee, he really believes that Linux kernel developers do things because those things are right? How'd have thought that?
...Hans Reiser, the author of two revolutionary Linux filesystems, Reiser3 and Reiser4.
So who authored Reiser1 and Reiser2? Was it Paul Reiser? Do you have to be named Reiser to work on the filesystem, or was it just a coincidence? Inquiring minds want to know.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
There's nothing a janitor or garbage collector can teach me or you, or most others on Slashdot.
How about humility?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Why is it that 'feel good' euphemisms have more standing than reason?
What are the odds that your lack of humility is actually reasonable? I was a freaking genius until I got out of college and met the real world.
And, if you must compare yourself to others, be very, very careful about doing it based on how they earn their living. I've known some pretty amazing janitors, for example, including one who was a very skilled Unix admin and programmer. I know another who janitor who is an extremely accomplished SCUBA diver who devours academic papers on decompression theory and writes his own software to calculate deco schedules for multi-stage, mixed-gas diving -- that's very complex stuff. He's also a skilled mechanic, welder, finish carpenter and a general jack of all trades -- but one who doesn't like to be tied to a job he can't just walk away from at any time. I know a garbage man who I call whenever I need help with my car or boat engines. I know a mail room guy who left a position as head chef of a top-notch restaurant, because he didn't like the stress. If you were to talk to him for a couple of minutes, you'd realize he's smart enough to do just about anything he wants... but what he wants is a low-stress, easy job that lets him focus on his life. He's an amazingly good mail room guy.
Judging people by their occupations is not just arrogance... it's high foolishness.
And all of that is just "hard" knowledge. There's a vast oceean of softer wisdom whose acquisition depends less on intelligence and more on time and, for lack of a better word, open-mindedness. A willingness to learn from anyone, ranging from the director of a research lab to a fifteen year-old kid with Downs Syndrome, will teach you more useful lessons about how to live a productive, happy life than you'll ever be able to discover on your own. Collectively, all of the people around you are much smarter than you are, even if you're individually smarter than every one of them.
I'm still working on learning how to put aside my prejudices and get what I can from everyone I meet. It's really hard, but well worth it.
Consider that for better or for worse, humility will not help you succeed in today's world.
But arrogance will regularly torpedo you. I've also known some great programmers who were such prima donna SOBs that they eventually couldn't find employment.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.