I think everyone should understand that he had large credit card debts, that he tried everything he could to make it work fiscally, and that the community failed to provide the finances that would make it work.
His approach was technically superior to the other distros in its fundamental approach, and funding could have cured any detail problems. It was the right approach. He went broke, and we should all be sad at this.
The nice thing would have been if some government had funded him. None did.
Thus he works for Microsoft. I imagine he is sadly bitter about it all.
Namesys is also having payroll problems, though our problem is more due to my divorce than anything else.
We would have the first fairly secure credit card ever made!
Of course, that would make it more work to use it and would require adding a keypad to the card, and the twits would never be willing to hassle with it, but....
You might also make it a pcmcia card that goes into a laptop/PDA, and then you can create a gui and everything....
Or, better than any of these, you can put it into a cell phone.... and the merchant can SMS your phone and ask you to approve the purchase.
If a program just scans for itself, and for computer security purposes securely ensures that it has not been tampered with, then according to this section the law does not apply to it....
Sec. 5 Section 3 or 4 of this act does not apply to any monitoring of, or interaction with, a subscriber's internet or other network connection or service, or a computer, by a telecommunications carrier, cable operator, computer hardware or software provider, or provider of information service or interactive computer service for network or computer security purposes, diagnostics, technical support, maintenance, repair, authorized updates of software or system firmware, authorized remote system management, or detection or prevention of the unauthorized use of or fraudulent or other illegal activities in connection with a network, service, or computer software, including scanning for and removing software under this chapter.
note the words about "computer security purposes", and "software provider"
I don't think that whether it is a filesystem or a database will have much effect on reliability. That depends on who wrote it, and more importantly (I wish it were otherwise), how long ago they wrote it.
Reiser4 has some atomicity functionality that will make applications that lack the sophisticated logging features of databases more reliable and secure, and it will improve performance and simplify application code, but one should not imagine that it offers more reliability than a traditional database with sophisticated logging built in to it.
they have a long history of predicting that Linux growth will be lower than what one would reasonably expect given the previous quarters at various free software companies. Remember back when Linux was doubling in a year or less, and they were predicting 27% growth?
They get a lot of press, and by pretending to be extolling Linux, and aided by naive free software advocates who go around giving publicity to their numbers, they actually succeed in making it look a lot smaller than it is.
Microsoft is notorious for spending money on dishonest pr flacks.
I wish there were real numbers on Linux usage growth over the last year. Surely it isn't doubling anymore, but I bet it is still gaining market share.
I disagree with the statement that "Every filesystem is a database at heart."
Most filesystems store files in block aligned files, meaning that they are poorly suited for storing phone number sized objects. The phone number sized objects that they do store (owner, permissions, etc.), are usually statically allocated with one off data structures, and very rigid in their implementation details.
Reiser4 tries to live up to your description, but we are the oddballs in the business.
Well, actually Reiser6 is vaporware, and Reiser4 is just the first storage layer that is really suitable for supporting adding database and search engine functionality into the filesystem. I grant you, it puts us years ahead of where MS is, but MS has much more funding, and our guys are spending at least half their time dealing with grubbing for money instead of coding.
Oh, and, let us not forget that there is a definite lack of political support for our work in the kernel community (especially among the other FS developers, ahem), and implementing the semantics would take 3-5 years if we got the funding today.
But hey, we do have a really sweet storage layer that blows away the other filesystems, while MS has seemingly given up on the serious algorithm issues we solved, and MS is now talking about putting the metadata into a layer above the FS rather than getting their tree algorithms right. Also, their semantics are probably going to be a confused hodge-podge of search engine and SQL shaped by turf battles with no single architect behind the design.
So, I have to say that things are looking interesting. I wish we had the funding I need to focus more of my time on coding and design.
Probably most of you whine about how we don't do enough to help the poor, and then here are some hardworking guys in foreign countries struggling to pull themselves out of their poverty, and you want to close the door on them.
Stop thinking of just your own greedy selves, and think of the welfare of mankind. Think about how it shouldn't have to matter what country a man is born in, he should have the same chance in life regardless.
Shame on you all.
Oh, and yes, I am biased, because hiring Russians allowed me to start my own company without any venture capital (Namesys), and I am a perfect example on a small scale of how globalization is making the US into a corporate headquarters location for the globe.
And yes, I am sitting around in the US doing the menial labor of running tests on the code my guys write for my US customer at its site because I could not get visas for my guys to come here, when I could be designing the next product instead.
I don't see how Americans becoming specialized in being the entrepeneurs of the world is such a bad thing.
No, actually, waiting before deleting the old copy is not enough. You need to make sure that there are not two copies.
Think of classic banking example: credit savings and debit checking are a single atomic operation. You must ensure that you don't get the credit preserved and the debit lost by a crash.
Keep in mind that redhat kernels are highly patched and they don't apply reiserfs bugfix patches out of a deliberate policy to exclude them (yes, we offered to supply them but were rejected), so we don't recommend the use of redhat kernels for reiserfs, we recommend the official kernel, or the SuSE kernel.
RedHat are the guys that at one point shipped their kernel with REISERFS_DEBUG turned on just to make us look slow.....
I don't know why RedHat regards us as in the enemy SuSE camp just because we took money from SuSE, we would take money from RedHat too if it was offered....;-)
The gentoo guys have not complained about my characterization, if they do in an email I will change it. As the other poster said, gentoo seems to prefer reiserfs in what they write and say.
No, atomic is the only option for reiser4, there is no metadata journaling even as an option. So, it both goes faster and keeps your data safer. It is nice when experiments with algorithms work....:)
Our approach is to first get it to where nobody in the developer team using all known filesystem crashing scripts collected over 10 years can crash it, and then ask our mailing list to crash it, and only then ask real users to try it.
That said, if you have a mission critical server, be sensible, wait a bit.
It is in the -mm kernel, if it goes without a bug report for a week, we send it to Linus. I hav been surprised by the lack of bug reports after going into -mm. All we have is one apache 2 bug report that we cannot reproduce yet.
Our response is definitely not so what. We might have told you that metadata journaling (what V3 uses) provides a level of service in which, like FFS and many other filesystems before it, if you crash during a write the write gets garbled.
Reiser4 is fully atomic though, and a write will either make it to disk entirely or not at all, with no data garbling. In other words, assuming that metadata journaling was what made you unhappy, we listened, but waited until a deep rewrite could allow us to fix it with no significant performance loss.
We are very happy that the use of wandering logs allowed us to make things atomic without losing any significant performance.
ext3 btrees are not well done performance wise. Most users are best off not using them, because they significantly slow performance unless directories are large, and I think that is why they are not on by default.
V3 of reiserfs paid a performance penalty for saving space and handling large directories efficiently. This irritated the shit out of me, the author, and we fixed it in V4 and then some.:)
V4 is finally to where it is sweet, and works like I fondly imagined earlier version of reiserfs would. We fixed deep design errors, and V4 is a complete rewrite from scratch reflecting all our regrets accumulated over 10 years of learning what the hell we were doing. We were beginners when we started out, as everyone is.
Now, the space savings makes things go faster not slower, and does not add seeks. We learned from XFS also, and allocation on flush works very well. Thanks SGI, for taking the time to explain to me why I should adopt allocation on flush in ReiserFS. XFS is a great filesystem.
Now that the performance advantage is ours for the now, and there aren't irritating flaws bothering me, we should and will move to semantic features not performance as our focus. The post above is right about that. Semantics matter more than performance.
Our atomicity does not provide isolation or rollback, it is only atomic in the sense of whether it survives a crash. That is, a reiser4 atomic set of operations will either all survive the crash or none of them will.
You can say that this is not really atomic, and by database traditions that is correct, but I believe we have implemented the aspect of atomicity that for sure should be implemented by the file system and not by the layers above.
Later we may support more isolation and rollback, but we started with allowing people to define a set of fs modifying operations that would either all be preserved across a crash or none of them would be preserved. I tried using the term "transcrash" instead of atom, but no one but me loved the term.
I must caution though that the API for defining an atomic set of filesystem operations is still being debugged. The core infrastructure is rock solid though, as it is what we use for atoms defined internal to the FS. We shipped as soon as our core code was rock solid, and plan to incrementally finish the other stuff over the coming year.
Reiser4 has a compression plugin coming. We got gzip to work, but it consumes too much cpu, so now we are doing lzo which can compress at disk drive speed. The lzo plugin has a bug, maybe next week....
It completely fails to define what exactly is the license difference being argued over. Oh well, I guess that wasn't of interest.... the flaming was what was interesting to the reporter/editor.
Would someone who knows please define what exactly is the license difference being argued over?
I don't see how any slashdot reader not already familiar with the dispute can have an informed opinion on this matter to post based on that article....
Slashdot Mirror
I like the code more. It is certainly more beautiful, and perhaps more useful too....
I think everyone should understand that he had large credit card debts, that he tried everything he could to make it work fiscally, and that the community failed to provide the finances that would make it work.
His approach was technically superior to the other distros in its fundamental approach, and funding could have cured any detail problems. It was the right approach. He went broke, and we should all be sad at this.
The nice thing would have been if some government had funded him. None did.
Thus he works for Microsoft. I imagine he is sadly bitter about it all.
Namesys is also having payroll problems, though our problem is more due to my divorce than anything else.
Hans
(Author of Reiser4)
We would have the first fairly secure credit card ever made!
Of course, that would make it more work to use it and would require adding a keypad to the card, and the twits would never be willing to hassle with it, but....
You might also make it a pcmcia card that goes into a laptop/PDA, and then you can create a gui and everything....
Or, better than any of these, you can put it into a cell phone.... and the merchant can SMS your phone and ask you to approve the purchase.
If a program just scans for itself, and for computer security purposes securely ensures that it has not been tampered with, then according to this section the law does not apply to it....
Sec. 5 Section 3 or 4 of this act does not apply to any monitoring of, or interaction with, a subscriber's internet or other network connection or service, or a computer, by a telecommunications carrier, cable operator, computer hardware or software provider, or provider of information service or interactive computer service for network or computer security purposes, diagnostics, technical support, maintenance, repair, authorized updates of software or system firmware, authorized remote system management, or detection or prevention of the unauthorized use of or fraudulent or other illegal activities in connection with a network, service, or computer software, including scanning for and removing software under this chapter.
note the words about "computer security purposes", and "software provider"
I don't think that whether it is a filesystem or a database will have much effect on reliability. That depends on who wrote it, and more importantly (I wish it were otherwise), how long ago they wrote it.
Reiser4 has some atomicity functionality that will make applications that lack the sophisticated logging features of databases more reliable and secure, and it will improve performance and simplify application code, but one should not imagine that it offers more reliability than a traditional database with sophisticated logging built in to it.
Hans Reiser
Author of ReiserFS
they have a long history of predicting that Linux growth will be lower than what one would reasonably expect given the previous quarters at various free software companies. Remember back when Linux was doubling in a year or less, and they were predicting 27% growth?
They get a lot of press, and by pretending to be extolling Linux, and aided by naive free software advocates who go around giving publicity to their numbers, they actually succeed in making it look a lot smaller than it is.
Microsoft is notorious for spending money on dishonest pr flacks.
I wish there were real numbers on Linux usage growth over the last year. Surely it isn't doubling anymore, but I bet it is still gaining market share.
Hans
www.namesys.com
Last night on PBS the pollsters were saying that their exit polls favored a Kerry victory, and they were disappointed by how wrong the polling was.
The exit polls favored Kerry by 1-3 percentage points but the "votes" favored Bush.
If the elections were rigged, those unexpected gaps between polls and votes are what you would expect in a well rigged election.
I don't know that the elections were rigged. How many of you have played Tropico (where you get to rig elections and so forth)?
It wouldn't be the first fraudulent US election (Lyndon Johnson rigged the vote in Texas).
I wrote the first design document for ReiserFS in 1984....
The nice thing about being slow in solving a hard problem is that others are also slow....
I disagree with the statement that "Every filesystem is a database at heart."
Most filesystems store files in block aligned files, meaning that they are poorly suited for storing phone number sized objects. The phone number sized objects that they do store (owner, permissions, etc.), are usually statically allocated with one off data structures, and very rigid in their implementation details.
Reiser4 tries to live up to your description, but we are the oddballs in the business.
Well, actually Reiser6 is vaporware, and Reiser4 is just the first storage layer that is really suitable for supporting adding database and search engine functionality into the filesystem. I grant you, it puts us years ahead of where MS is, but MS has much more funding, and our guys are spending at least half their time dealing with grubbing for money instead of coding.
Oh, and, let us not forget that there is a definite lack of political support for our work in the kernel community (especially among the other FS developers, ahem), and implementing the semantics would take 3-5 years if we got the funding today.
But hey, we do have a really sweet storage layer that blows away the other filesystems, while MS has seemingly given up on the serious algorithm issues we solved, and MS is now talking about putting the metadata into a layer above the FS rather than getting their tree algorithms right. Also, their semantics are probably going to be a confused hodge-podge of search engine and SQL shaped by turf battles with no single architect behind the design.
So, I have to say that things are looking interesting. I wish we had the funding I need to focus more of my time on coding and design.
Probably most of you whine about how we don't do enough to help the poor, and then here are some hardworking guys in foreign countries struggling to pull themselves out of their poverty, and you want to close the door on them.
Go read Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations , and you will discover how trade barriers simply impoverish both sides of the barrier.
Stop thinking of just your own greedy selves, and think of the welfare of mankind. Think about how it shouldn't have to matter what country a man is born in, he should have the same chance in life regardless.
Shame on you all.
Oh, and yes, I am biased, because hiring Russians allowed me to start my own company without any venture capital (Namesys), and I am a perfect example on a small scale of how globalization is making the US into a corporate headquarters location for the globe.
And yes, I am sitting around in the US doing the menial labor of running tests on the code my guys write for my US customer at its site because I could not get visas for my guys to come here, when I could be designing the next product instead.
I don't see how Americans becoming specialized in being the entrepeneurs of the world is such a bad thing.
No, actually, waiting before deleting the old copy is not enough. You need to make sure that there are not two copies.
Think of classic banking example: credit savings and debit checking are a single atomic operation. You must ensure that you don't get the credit preserved and the debit lost by a crash.
The poster above you was right.
Keep in mind that redhat kernels are highly patched and they don't apply reiserfs bugfix patches out of a deliberate policy to exclude them (yes, we offered to supply them but were rejected), so we don't recommend the use of redhat kernels for reiserfs, we recommend the official kernel, or the SuSE kernel.
RedHat are the guys that at one point shipped their kernel with REISERFS_DEBUG turned on just to make us look slow.....
I don't know why RedHat regards us as in the enemy SuSE camp just because we took money from SuSE, we would take money from RedHat too if it was offered....;-)
These distro rivalries are distasteful to me.
Hasn
The gentoo guys have not complained about my characterization, if they do in an email I will change it. As the other poster said, gentoo seems to prefer reiserfs in what they write and say.
Hans
No, atomic is the only option for reiser4, there is no metadata journaling even as an option. So, it both goes faster and keeps your data safer. It is nice when experiments with algorithms work.... :)
Hans
Our approach is to first get it to where nobody in the developer team using all known filesystem crashing scripts collected over 10 years can crash it, and then ask our mailing list to crash it, and only then ask real users to try it.
That said, if you have a mission critical server, be sensible, wait a bit.
It is in the -mm kernel, if it goes without a bug report for a week, we send it to Linus. I hav been surprised by the lack of bug reports after going into -mm. All we have is one apache 2 bug report that we cannot reproduce yet.
If we go for a week in -mm with no bug reports, I send it to Linus.
I think those bugs were fixed a while ago.
Our response is definitely not so what. We might have told you that metadata journaling (what V3 uses) provides a level of service in which, like FFS and many other filesystems before it, if you crash during a write the write gets garbled.
Reiser4 is fully atomic though, and a write will either make it to disk entirely or not at all, with no data garbling. In other words, assuming that metadata journaling was what made you unhappy, we listened, but waited until a deep rewrite could allow us to fix it with no significant performance loss.
We are very happy that the use of wandering logs allowed us to make things atomic without losing any significant performance.
We only have a 100 megabit fiber optic connection to the internet, and it can't handle this load, sigh.... Slashdot is amazing....
Hans
XFS is better than ext3 for streaming large files and worse for "typical" file size distributions. XFS is more interesting than ext3 I think.
ext3 btrees are not well done performance wise. Most users are best off not using them, because they significantly slow performance unless directories are large, and I think that is why they are not on by default.
V3 of reiserfs paid a performance penalty for saving space and handling large directories efficiently. This irritated the shit out of me, the author, and we fixed it in V4 and then some.:)
V4 is finally to where it is sweet, and works like I fondly imagined earlier version of reiserfs would. We fixed deep design errors, and V4 is a complete rewrite from scratch reflecting all our regrets accumulated over 10 years of learning what the hell we were doing. We were beginners when we started out, as everyone is.
Now, the space savings makes things go faster not slower, and does not add seeks. We learned from XFS also, and allocation on flush works very well. Thanks SGI, for taking the time to explain to me why I should adopt allocation on flush in ReiserFS. XFS is a great filesystem.
Now that the performance advantage is ours for the now, and there aren't irritating flaws bothering me, we should and will move to semantic features not performance as our focus. The post above is right about that. Semantics matter more than performance.
Our atomicity does not provide isolation or rollback, it is only atomic in the sense of whether it survives a crash. That is, a reiser4 atomic set of operations will either all survive the crash or none of them will.
You can say that this is not really atomic, and by database traditions that is correct, but I believe we have implemented the aspect of atomicity that for sure should be implemented by the file system and not by the layers above.
Later we may support more isolation and rollback, but we started with allowing people to define a set of fs modifying operations that would either all be preserved across a crash or none of them would be preserved. I tried using the term "transcrash" instead of atom, but no one but me loved the term.
I must caution though that the API for defining an atomic set of filesystem operations is still being debugged. The core infrastructure is rock solid though, as it is what we use for atoms defined internal to the FS. We shipped as soon as our core code was rock solid, and plan to incrementally finish the other stuff over the coming year.
Reiser4 has a compression plugin coming. We got gzip to work, but it consumes too much cpu, so now we are doing lzo which can compress at disk drive speed. The lzo plugin has a bug, maybe next week....
Hans
(You can email edward@namesys.com for details).
It completely fails to define what exactly is the license difference being argued over. Oh well, I guess that wasn't of interest.... the flaming was what was interesting to the reporter/editor.
Would someone who knows please define what exactly is the license difference being argued over?
I don't see how any slashdot reader not already familiar with the dispute can have an informed opinion on this matter to post based on that article....
Hans