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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.
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.
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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?
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.
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As far as I can tell btrfs has what features would be worth taking and then some - and is under more active development. I think reiserfs is dead long-term.
I ran reiser3 for a long time. I was happy with it. But these days I'm on ext4 (and eyeing btrfs). Wonderful thing about btrfs and the ext* FS's is that they provided a migration plan. Reiser4 (at least last I checked) could not convert an existing FS (even reiser3). btrfs can even convert ext4 and allow you *TO GO BACK* if you want. How awesome is that?
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
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).
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?
Yeah, you shouldn't be. It was obvious to the police, and to those of us here not in love with the 'aspie geek as lovable, misunderstood misanthrope' stereotype that he did it. The minute the evidence came out, it screamed "he totally fucking killed her!" From Nina disappearing without her passport or money or cell phone, to Hans hosing out the interior of his car, to buying police procedure textbooks, all after Nina started to separate from him... Don't let Alex Belits' contortions confuse you. It was a good conviction based on straightforward evidence of first degree murder.
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in 20 years to life.
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