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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.
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.
What's also key is that the better points of ReiserFS, such as journaling, have migrated into other file systems. The experiment wasn't a failure, it was a darn good idea that has led to an overall improvement in reliability and speed of other file systems.
I am officially gone from
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?
I've been watching Btrfs and it feels like they're merging in most of the features Reiser had in mind without saying so explicitly. I've considered it a spiritual successor for a while now.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
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
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
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.
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).
Journaling is not the main attraction of ReiserFS. It's the validation of the million-small-file design. Why use a database? Why accumulate records in larger files? Just make every record a separate file (and Hans Reiser wanted to go even further down that path).
Numerous software systems have employed the million-small-file approach. It is simple, natural, attractive. There are lots of handy shell utilities for ad-hoc scripts and other useful tricks.
The ReiserFS was all about the namespace. We already have it in linux/unix. It's the file system namespace. It should be used to the fullest. Reading a small file should be as efficient as reading a line of a larger file.
Screw SQL. All data should be amenable to grep, awk, perl, od, rm, mv, ln, sort, head, cut &co.
I don't think it's appropriate to refer to serial killings as a comedy.
in 20 years to life.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."