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The File-System Fallout of the Reiser Verdict
perlow writes "Yesterday, the Open Source community took an emotional hit when veteran Linux programmer Hans Reiser was convicted of first degree murder in the suspicious disappearing of his wife, Nina. While I won't go into the details of the case, as this has been covered extensively in the press, I would like to talk a little bit about how this verdict will impact the technology in play for file system dominance in our favorite Open Source operating system, Linux."
that maybe control of ReiserFS will now be in the hands of someone who is not a total cock... sorry, a wife-murdering total cock. Hans Reiser's ability ot play nice with others made you long for Theo de Raadt's sunny demeanor. Given that the code is Free, having it under the control of someone who is not a complete sociopath can't help but the increase uptake of the novel parts of the ReiserFS structure.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Isn't it true that much of Reiser4 is already coded? Since Reiser is GPL 2, there is nothing to stop the remaining developers -- or anyone else -- from picking up the ball and running with it. Namesys hired at least 1 or 2 full-time developers other than Reiser, although my guess is that since their Web site is currently down, there is probably nothing left of Namesys since Namesys is/was mostly Reiser, his (still missing, possibly deceased) wife Nina, and Reiser's father.
So, probably with no money, my guess is the hired hands won't continue work, but I am unable to speak for them.
Still, ReiserFS could continue without Hans, right?
My blog
25 years of coding in prison might yield some significant product. You can put him away physically, but I think we should still let his brilliant mind to continue to benefit the society.
from the quirks of the inventor.
If this file system is superiour, then it should stand.
However naming the delete function 'Wife' would be lacking in class....
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Doesn't even mention XFS.
My blog
I used ReiserFS for years but it's already dead. I left it shortly after the trial began because it was already having stability problems. After some time it would deteriorate and eventually corrupt itself. Today's doesn't change the fact that ReiserFS hasn't seen much development in the last ~2 years.
I was sad when I found out he was on trial. I had one of his quotes on my cubicle wall from him about development when I found out about the arrest. Hans Reiser is a good developer. Apparently he's not a very good person.
Recent versions of ReiserFS have had stability and performance problems for some time and will die a normal open source death on merits.
ReiserFS isn't even a has-been file system, it's an almost-was, and was never a real contender for a top filesystem, no matter how much some users loved it. It was, in reality, half dead by the time Reiser got arrested.
Why wasn't it taken seriously by everyone?
- When it encountered problems, it crashed spectacularly. You didn't just lose a file or a block of a file, you lost entire trees and could get metadata instead of file data and vice versa.
- It lacked basic tools, like "dump"/"restore" or "freeze".
- The fsck rebuild process was a security nightmare. A user could craft a file with data that would appear to the fsck process to be metadata, and take over the system after a reboot. In typical arrogance, the solution was "don't reboot, then".
- It didn't support streams or compatible metadata, thus no Mac sharing or SELinux. SELinux in particular is a requirement for many big corporations right now, and not supporting it means no buy.
And, yes, the arrogance of the maintainer played a part too. But even with a much nicer guy running the show, it would not have been a serious contender for the throne.
It's time we forget ReiserFS and move on.
The blog even mentions NTFS as potentially a default FS for linux distros? I almost thought that this was april fools again. In fact, perhaps the author of the blog should see comments that Hans has made about NTFS. (I believe they were something to the effect of "WTF was Microsoft smoking?")
/tmp/bah.lst
Reiser4 has been great especially in applications such as maildir storage, where we have thousands of files in each directory. Can NTFS do tail packing? What about treeing instead of bitmapping the filesystem? I think not. Hell, I bet ext3 would choke as well with a dir of 15,000 files. I have no problems with reiser4.
From a PIII-733 w/384MB RAM and a simple IDE 30GB HD:
time ls -l >
real 0m20.071s
user 0m5.873s
sys 0m6.518s
That's on a directory with over 120,000 small files in it (it's from a maildir). I somehow doubt that NTFS or ext3 would be even half this fast at something as trivial as ls on this dir.
I honestly don't care whether or not he killed his wife. I only care about having the filesystem. I don't know how much Edward Shishkin is going to continue maintaining the code base now. I will greatly lament the loss of Reiser4.
The blog post makes it sound like Reiser was the supreme overlord of the Linux operating system, and that his prison sentence means that Linux will be destroyed...
Folks, get over it! These things happen! People make mistakes, mess up, or wind up in jail, but everyone adjusts to the change. Just use ext3! Or better yet, if your so worried about it, MAKE YOUR OWN DAMN FILE SYSTEM (but just don't become homicidal in the process)
Linux is worked on by MILLIONS OF PEOPLE worldwide. SO that means one persons departure will NOT destroy Linux, since there are still PLENTY more people to work on it. Remember the Gizmondo? That got ruined because of one of the owners' connections to the mafia. Most of the board of directors and CEOs wound up in prison, so the Gizmondo was canceled. But the difference here is that WE HAVE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE TO PICK UP THE PIECES!
I will only be worried when EVERY Linux programmer in the world winds up in prison...
Either way, when MS-DOS first came out, I don't recall anybody claiming that it wasn't an operating system.
When MS-DOS came out, I was working for a company that was busy porting Unix to microprocessors. The people who were doing that found DOS's status as an OS pretty laughable.
To most people, the "operating system" is the user interface. That's why some vendors get away with calling a collection of AJAX applications a "web OS". But we're not talking about what people perceive an OS to be, we're talking about what an OS does.
The question of whether some software is an OS is not a religious issue. You take the services a typical OS provides and match them against what the software actually provides. 86DOS provided almost nothing behind the very basic service of loading executable images into RAM and invoking them. Applications had to provide their own functionality for services that any Unix or CP/M user would consider part of the OS: buffered IO, processes scheduling, etc.
Ironically, that's what created the lockin that made Bill Gates the richest man on the planet: MS-DOS applications were poorly insulated from the underlying hardware, and were thus not very portable. That destroyed the market for platforms that didn't have a high level of compatibility with the original IBM PC. (Which is why IBM's own PS/2-OS/2 effort went nowhere.) And to achieve that level of compatibility, you had to have MS-DOS. Not despite its bugs and limitations, but because of them!
"Now, you're right, that list alone creates a plausible but by no means airtight case that he killed her and disposed of the body."
It doesn't need to be much more than "plausible." The jury decided that there was no room for reasonable doubt. If all juries were required to have "airtight" evidence before convicting, Charles Manson would be a free man (recall that he meticulously ensured he had no direct hand in the murders). It's possible that he didn't kill her. It's possible it was the Chinese spies, or Al Qaeda, or the GNAA trolls that killed her instead. But every last member of the jury concluded that there was only one likely explanation.
"Since there's little worth lying about that's more important than being falsely convicted of murder, the jury concluded that his lies were covering up a murder. In short, he talked himself into jail. He's not the first defendant to do that."
His was not the only testimony in the trial; after all, he hired professional attorneys to represent him, who had the ability to present evidence and testimony in his defense, as well as challenge the testimonies of those against him. There was far more in this trial than Reiser's testimony alone, this has been going on for several months now.
It is possible that the jury improperly convicted him because his testimony prejudiced them, but I have yet to see any juror interviews where one said "I was going to acquit until he took the stand," and even if one came anywhere near saying that, that's what the appeals process is for.
Yes, it really is possible for someone from your community to brutally murder someone. It's time to move past the "denial" phase, before I start to point out that the "It's not airtight!" hand-waving is something one would expect from the Intelligent Design camp.
Without the BIOS, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any OS that would install and run. Therefore, I submit that the BIOS is the true operating system, with everythign else being an abstraction from that low-level functionality.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.