Slashdot Mirror
Reiser4 File System Still In Development
An anonymous reader writes "Reiser4 still hasn't been merged into the mainline Linux kernel, but it's still being worked on by a small group of developers following Hans Reiser being convicted for murdering his wife. Reiser4 was updated in September on SourceForge to work with the Linux 3.5 kernel and has been benchmarked against EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and ReiserFS. Reiser4 loses out in most of the Linux file-system performance tests, has much stigma due to Hans Reiser, and Btrfs is surpassing it feature-wise, so does it have any future in Linux ahead?"
If you can find any name that's not related to murdering your wife, go for it. Bonus points if it's catchy.
One of the strneghts, and weaknesses, of the OSS community is trying bunches of things in parrell to see which ones pan out well. But after a point, it is probably better to just like a project die. Granted no one can tell the individual developers what is 'worth' their time since that is a personal matter, I am sure other projects could use their talents more then this one. ReiserFS is a solution looking for a problem where better solutions surpass it.
Nope...time to say buh bye.
Would we even be bothered in following this kind of story if it weren't for the murder? If not than just let it go now.
Make it more popular (or less unpopular, as it were), by giving it a name change.
Call it 'RicerFS', and make everyone compile it from sources only (especially for Gentoo users).
Thank you, thank you. I'm here all week.
There's going to be a few off color jokes. May as well get started.
* It's a killer filesystem.
* My disk died. Was ReiserFS the murderer?
* It's more cutting edge than Reiser's knife.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Sorry for being on topic. I remember discussing this on /. and I'm still kinda surprised Hans actually did it. I still think it was a bad conviction, even if it randomly happened to have turned out to be correct. Kind of like the salem witch trial convictions were wrong, even if we somehow figured out one of them was a real live magical genuine witch after the fact (however unlikely that would be).
Anyway, enough dr phil and now on to IT stuff:
1) Most benchmarks don't matter. Nobody makes money running benchmarks. Because the cost of casting up a production image is virtually (ha ha) zero because of virtualization SW and NAS stuff and puppet and some other tools, its well worth your while to spend an hour or two trying various instrumented FS to see which is fastest under your own workload, unless your workload is so stereotypical you can just rely on the hivemind opinion. Best of all if you can load balance on the FE then run multiple BE each with different FS and if applicable different FS parameters then watch how each FS actually performs under real live load. This is how REAL IT is done, as opposed to "I drunk me an energy drink and got a linux CDrom with this magazine and read me a slashdot article" style IT. I would not be surprised if somebody with some totally werido workload actually benefits off running reiserfs. Its a huge possible solution space and I'm sure it wins somewhere.
2) Check out the contents of something like /lib/modules/"somethin"/kernel/fs. Dude, I've got a minix module which I haven't used production since 1992 ish era (running minix of course). As long as someone, somewhere, has an old disk image from some historical whatever, someone's probably going to want computer archaeologist tools to look at the innards on a modern system. Admittedly for minix and maybe soon reiserfs, they might be better served by something like "mtools for reiserfs" than a kernel module or a FUSE solution, but if someone wants to do something in free software that you don't personally like, well good luck stopping them. Whaddya gonna do, change the license to something non-free just to stop them? Good luck!
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Einstein did invent the atomic bomb, didn't he...?
That said, sure, strip his name from the file system to dishonour him, but at least acknowledge that we _do_ use all sorts of tech today invented by people who did some pretty bad shit...
On the bight side, Hans might have a 20 year all expenses paid development cycle ahead of him. Think of the contribution he could make if allowed to.
Talk about making productive use of prisoners time.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
has much stigma due to Hans Reiser
Really? You can't just judge it based on it's features and performance?
So if Linus Torvalds ever commits a crime, you'll stop using Linux?
The murder scandal got the project waylaid long enough that everyone else moved on.
Even if the stigma that threw banana peels in the way is gone, reiser4 is still far behind.
If it's open source, cannibalize it and take the features.
It has killer performance.
It kills the other filesystems in the benchmarks.
Fight Spammers!
But let the team try to succeed, and maybe entice another high-grade mathematician into the project to boot. Any strangeness is exterior to the project despite the name, and there are plenty of advances we embrace despite the origins. Hypothermia studies, for example (in my junior high class they asked about the ethics of retaining knowledge obtained unethically.) Or Shockley, who invented the transistor but advocated eugenics later in life.
It's not pretty, but you cannot write off the contributions to science of someone -- or some group -- whose actions you might find abhorrent at some level. Wernher von Braun put the U.S. on the moon, like it or not. One act doesn't reduce an entire career to the trash heap.
There is no reason why a convict should be denied the tools and space to develop software when that software is in everyone's best interest. Even if it was some sort of nonsense app that would provide an income for a convict following release or just keep his skills up to par so that he had hope of earning a living upon release it would be in the public interest.
One of the main reasons for another conviction often relates to convicts being kept out of decent jobs when they are put on the streets. If people can not earn a living they don't just dry out like a worm on a sidewalk. A legal living made unavailable will steer them into crime, or cause drunken behaviors that lead to re-arrest.
If you can't change it, embrace it!
People always say X is the killer FS, no Y is the killer FS. Well, this one really is.
Dark humor aside, back in 2003-2004 in my university lab we were running a project that required processing of massive amounts of small files. I had trial runs over the linux file systems of the era and Reiser (I guess version 3 back then?) was so much faster in that context that it could actually save significant processing time. So it I always thought it a real shame that the main developer committed murder and development pretty much stopped back then. Yeah, there are now faster and better FSs, but perhaps Reiser would be a great option as well.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Well, it is a killer file system....
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Lack of knowledge is so sad. One has only to have a passing understanding of data models to read Reiser’s paper and realise he
does not understand the fundamental concepts of the field. Such a waste of time, money and talents.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
I stopped using ReiserFS long before it's namesake was arrested. It used to lose data. That's pretty much a showstopper for a filesystem who's claim to fame was reliability.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
It should be out in about 15 years - earlier with good behavior.
The bottom of the first page in Phoronix's benchmarks says "The disk drive being used for all testing was a high-end 160GB Intel SSD." Since different filesystems are optimized for different things, it seems such benchmarks could be completely irrelevant for anyone using hard drives (where seek times are very significant compared to SSD).
The murder of his wife was the straw that broke the camel's back, but for me, I started turning away from Reiser based on the sliminess of the Burke character he played in "Aliens". Of course, that "Mad About You" shit didn't help much, either.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
For example developers should be jailed for being late in delivering code.
Will more people think of Ted Bundy, a serial killer, or Al Bundy, a character played by Ed O'Neill on the sitcom Married with Children?
He said his package.use is long.
Einstein didn't even get security clearance to work on the Manhattan project because he was a pacifist.
There were about 10 000 scientists working on the Manhattan project, but if I had to name the inventor of the atomic bomb, I would say it was Leo Szilard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_letter
... but I tried ReiserFS once and most of my files disappeared. I wish he was available to lead me out to where he hid them.
We know from experience that hidden files won't stay hidden for long. A little coersion and it confesses everything--all in hopes that it won't get reformatted.
of an acclaimed FS is on the horizon and we laugh at its creator who murdered his wife. Im not sure how it works in other countries, but in America the prison system is just another device for enacting biblical retribution. Hans isnt seeing any treatment for his actions, rather hes spending 15 years to life in prison.
Depending on your personal conviction to things like the death penalty and crime in general, you could consider the man who brought you a glorious experiment, ReiserFS, is a sick man. He's been taken to the cleaners for 60 million in a wrongful death suit, which is said to go to "the kids" but seriously sounds like it was orchestrated by their grandmother. After the trial he insisted the attorney forced him to take the stand, and afterwards served as his own attorney. Hes repeating the same delusional actions of self representation he did during the original trial, and no one considers this a manifestation of an illness.
if none of this makes any sense and you're still subscribed to the idea that prison was the best solution for this man, then you can revel in the computer chair justice of knowing he was brutally assaulted by several prisoners in 2009. The DOJ's solution, not to rehabilitate or anything, was simply to shuffle what amounts to another cash cow to another farm. he is currently in Pleasant Valley state prison.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The man who only wanted to murder his wife.
I have fond memories of how half of Slashdot was convinced Reiser was innocent and being prosecuted by agents of Microsoft, as a message to Linux developers. His conviction just fueled the speculations. It wasn't until he led authorities to the body that Slashdot gave up on the idea.
Nothing quite as romantic ...
Always remember: The shortest way to a woman's heart is through her ribcage
According to Paul of Tarsus, revenge is someone else's job, not ours (Romans 12:19).
in 20 years to life.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
But it just uninstalled my car's passenger seat. Has anyone else seen this?
You may want to tone down your sensitivity for this one, it was not serious.
I believe what sealed it in the end was that he eventually led them to the body in return for more lenient sentence. Pretty hard to argue his innocence after that.
I believe the next big thing is ZFS. My paranoid side reads these articles about how disk error rates are staying about the same, but disk capacities are going up and up. I'm thinking that ZFS and anything else that can verify the reads / writes sucess is a very good thing moving forward.
No! don't re-integrate it, it's cursed!
- I stole your sig.
As far as anybody should care this does not matter much - it says fairly little with regards to whether he actually did or did not kill his wife and unless there's a body and physical evidence (and as far as I know there is only circumstantial - his wife has been in his car, yeah, surprise), this will remain a not quite shut and sealed matter.
If the filesystem is any good the issue above is moot regardless. Just stop with the cheap puns. Guilty or not, being convicted is a very shady metric to determine it reliably.
It is not about punishment; maybe to you and most American twisted fucks. Prison is to keep antisocial people away from the society they are unable to live in. If they can be productive or beneficial to society by other means then they should be. The birdman of Alcatraz helped society more than most people and he was reformed but that is another issue. If you kill people then you can't be trusted; however, if one is "fixed" then maybe they can be let out; if you can't be sure they are "fixed" then you do not take the risk and keep thin removed from society. Punishment has limited benefits and going to extremes like the USA harms society; and I suppose they deserve what they inflict upon themselves... fools eventually hurt themselves.
For a Christian nation the USA is extremely unchristian. Vengeance is for god and blasphemers.
File system corruption on that system means wiping and staring again - there's no fsck to fix minor errors. The reason given for this lack was that it was a perfect system, which is no help at all if it's not running on perfect hardware.
It's a proof of concept system that is not yet designed for use in any situation where the contents of the data stored on the file system actually matter.
It doesn't even have fsck and that delay was from replaying a portion of the journal. There's nothing wrong with that, ext* does that too, but it did seem to be almost as slow doing it as ext* takes with a full fsck a couple of times a year.
let's name btrfs as reiser5!
You may want to tone down your sensitivity for this one, it was not serious.
Different AC here telling you to fuck off too. Making jokes about murderous thoughts towards spouses in the context of Hans Reiser, who actually murdered his wife and was more or less proud of it (because in his mind the bitch was asking for it by defying him)? Not actually funny. "I WAS JOKING" is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It is in fact possible to cross the line over into not-funny and just plain offensive territory, and you're totally out of line for whining about people being too "sensitive".
Encourages homicide.
Microsoft, take note.
OK then - instead of calling people names (ie. spreader of fear, uncertainty and doubt - think you need a different insult for the merely ignorant) for not keeping in touch with changes to what we all assumed was a dead project for the past few years how about letting us know how long ago it came in? I can't tell from that link on your other post and had incorrectly assumed that the messy dd method was still the only hope. If I mucked about with that stupid waste of time for no reason a few years back I'm going to feel very silly.
--Sorry bout that; it's just the way you came across. Personally, I had only a vague idea that Reiser4 was still in semi-active development until I saw this Slashdot headline.
--I did come up with a few links, but as for when $bug was fixed in Reiserfs, you would prolly have to search the kernel mailing lists or the project's home page.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Reiser4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiser4#History_of_Reiser4
https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FAQ
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
Thanks for that. I only ever saw Reiserfs when it failed so I'd say I have a skewed impression on it. One of the more trendy than stable linux distros had Reiserfs as it's default some years ago when it was still in a state of rapid change, and a few people at my workplace put it on laptops. Combine beta software with less than perfect drives and frequent power loss (laptops running out of charge) and it's a pretty tough situation for a filesystem. The nail in the coffin was a lot of files of a size the file system couldn't handle very well at that point (I can't remember if they were multi-GB sizes files or thousands of 1k ones - R&D had situations with both), especially if the user let the thing lose power and it had to slowly replay it's journal on startup with that file size the filesystem wasn't designed to handle well at that point. We never actually lost anything worth recovering, but it was a pain at times.
Maybe I should give it another look, but I'm one of those types that's not even going to use btrfs or a linux zfs system yet on anything where I can't tolerate losing a days worth of new files.