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Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

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Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#371

Post by scotty79 »

lannisterstark wrote: post #369
scotty79 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. Some of them. Not everone who joins the army is a volunteer killer. Some people just want to help. Treat wounds. Recover wounded. Scare the enemy away. Some tentatively accept that some people might die in the process. People tend to accept that in war people die. They are more like armed robbers who'd love to have their goals met without killing anyone but some are accepting that someone might die in the…

This is such a naive point of view. Imagine seeing somebody getting assaulted, genocided, murdered in front of your eyes and then closing your eyes for the sake of 'peace,' or the idea of it that you have in mind anyway. You should tell the Polish people in 1940s that they should only treat wounds and not fight back.

I'm Polish. How much good do you think killing Germans did for Polish people in 1940?

Compare to France and other western European countries that immediately retreated, lost one battle and peacefully folded and stayed down till the end.

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#372

Post by account42 »

jacquesm wrote: post #122
eatbitseveryday wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ending another human's life leaves any possibility of redemption for a person You realize the volunteer soldiers that enter a battle to kill other humans also fall under this scope? Yet in many countries we celebrate their return and service, despite what they may have done. I agree these are not quite the same thing, in how a deed is carried out, but the end result is in fact the same.

It's called the department of defense for a reason, even if in plenty of cases the military is used offensively. Volunteer soldiers that go abroad to try to annex another country at the behest of their local overlord are looked at differently then volunteer soldiers that defend their country from annexation. It's not that the 'end result is in fact the same', it's that circumstances matter. In some cases killing anot…

> Volunteer soldiers that go abroad to try to annex another country at the behest of their local overlord are looked at differently then volunteer soldiers that defend their country from annexation.

Are they? Americans seem to think very highly of their veterans ... who all fought in distant wars in countries that were not an serious immediate threat to the US.

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#373

Post by account42 »

iaw wrote: post #26
throwaway365980 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I am not going to touch on your other points as you clearly have decided your mind. > why a mistake he committed in personal life would make his file system a taboo to touch. He is no longer here to fix bugs or improve the file system, it is not that it's Taboo to touch per se. The benefits of ReiserFS are no longer clear compared to alternatives, there's a cost to including ReiserFS (which Reiser acknowledges), no o…

> premeditated murderer

This is an opinion and not something backed by any known facts.

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#374

Post by scotty79 »

lannisterstark wrote: post #370
scotty79 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are literally thousands of examples throughout history of smaller ethnic groups that were completely wiped out by their bigger and more aggressive neighbors. Exactly. Figting and killing didn't help them in any way. > Do you think these small groups were provoking their neighbors? Why? Did they all have a death wish? The wrong decision in that case was deciding to be separate from their neighbors despite the…

Appeasement didn't work in 1939, it wouldn't work now.

I'm not talking about appeasement. I'm talking about peacefully losing all there is to lose.

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#375

Post by bawolff »

mardifoufs wrote: post #305
bawolff wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would there be anything he could say?

Honestly? No not really. Not until he gets his parole I guess. The stakes are way too high for him to be honest. He might very well be, but the phrasing is just very "list checking" to me still. As someone else said, it's like the generic stuff you learn from therapy (at best, if we assume he's honest).

I get that, but at the same time it seems like a bit of a dystopia if there is no path to this person being rehabilitated despite his sins (i wanted to say "forgiven", but that seems like a whole other thing i guess). I don't know, maybe he doesn't deserve to be treated like a normal person ever again. But then is he just condemned forever? Is there no way for him to obtain grace for lack of a better word? How horrific that feels.

Hell, i dont know. Maybe there are no good answers in the face of such things.

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#376

Post by account42 »

jacquesm wrote: post #189
kstrauser wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Philosophical question: if "fake it 'til you make it" allowed someone to emulate a human (I like your phrasing here) well enough that they, indeed, act like a human... isn't that good enough? The biblical advice to "judge not, that ye be not judged" seems relevant here. It's pretty obvious to me that it refers to a person's heart , that is, their internal desires and motivations that no one but them can truly know. I…

It would if you would be sure that they'd never break out of character. But that's a tricky question: if someone who has already murdered someone in cold blood with substantial premeditation presents a changed exterior do you perceive the chances of them doing that as premeditation as well as larger than the chances that they've really changed? I'm happy I'm not on that parole board, and I hope they have budget for a…

> with substantial premeditation

You really need to come up with actual evidence for that if you keep repeating it everywhere.

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#377

Post by account42 »

flatt wrote: post #312
kstrauser wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is he a diagnosed psychopath? I'll grant that murdering one's wife seems like good supporting evidence, but I'm not aware that he's known to be one.

It's not even the murder so much as it's the premeditation. Even the most non-psychopathic mentally ill individuals with the most awful intrusive thoughts will still have an active conscience telling them not to do the things their minds are telling them to do. This is a big part of the torture schizophrenics are going through. Psychopaths do not have a conscience and psychopathy is not a diagnosis. The diagnosis giv…

What's your evidence that the murder was premeditated though? As far as we know he didn't even look into how to cover it up until afterwards.

All the known facts are congurent with someone who acted in the heat of the moment and then tried to get the best result for himself considering the very bad situation he got himself in. Trying to cover up the act and mislead the court is certainly not very ethical but it is a far cry from the murder itself being premeditated.

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#378

Post by account42 »

dilyevsky wrote: post #171
vimax wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should prisons be about punishment rather than rehabilitation?

It’s supposed to be both. There’s three components actually: punitive, deterrence and rehabilitation

Aren't you forgetting the most important reason for locking people up: protecting the rest of society.

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#379

Post by gregw2 »

bombcar wrote: post #289
resters wrote: post #248

There used to be a lot of content about Hans Reiser on Slashdot back in the days before HN. His statements, code and conduct were controversial long before the murder. I'm curious if anyone has insight into his technical contributions. Were they: - ahead of their time but now superseded by other filesystems - visionary but not fully realized/implemented - other

It's kind of a combination of all three. He was "right place/right time" with a working journalling filesystem for a rapidly expanding Linux world that needed one, desperately. Drive sizes were climbing incredibly fast, and FSCK times were out of control (back then, almost all distros wouldn't mount "dirty" ext2 partitions without a full FSCK, which could take ages on a 100 GB drive. Some of the concepts of (as he sa…

Re: “Reiser3 pioneered journal metadata only”, a metadata-only approach to journaling actually was not uncommon (although for Linux, journaling at all for a time was not available).

This first journalled Unix file system in AIX in the early 90s was metadata only, and faster fsck made it an appealing feature copied by all other commercial Unixes by the late 90s. In the latter 90s, DigitalUnix was the first Unix vendor to provide journaling data, not just metadata. Even SGI’s XFS which had a number of cool and unique features around extent structures optimized for serving video stream large file did not have journaled data.

Most people in Unix then (and now) are unaware of “uncool” operating systems like OS/400 (now iSeries) which arguably delivered on that dream of a melding RAM, ROM, disk, cache. It wasn’t POSIX/Unix/hacker-friendly/cheap but it was and I think still is a billion dollar minicomputer business for IBM. I believe they called it “Single-Level Store Architecture”.

Wikipedia for this for the interested (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i ): “Instead of operating on memory addresses, TIMI instructions operate on objects. All data in IBM i, such as data files, source code, programs and regions of allocated memory, are encapsulated inside objects managed by the operating system (c.f. the "Everything is a file" model in Unix). …The object model hides whether data is stored in primary, or secondary storage. Instead, the operating system automatically handles the process of retrieving and then storing the changes to permanent storage.”

I believe lisp machines back in the day had something grossly similar.

The difficulty (impossibility?) of implementing this sort of file system in the confines of POSIX (with extensions even?) is probably why this never happened in Unix.

As Reiner’s 2023 letter we are discussing notes, this required new information/hints flowing up and down the layers of the stack. It’d require implementing a new userspace+kernel paradigm of application development alongside the current one.

Accomplishing that sort of transformation in an ecosystem takes a very unique blend of skills and knowledge, and it’s additionally not clear how much economic benefit accrues to anyone for making this shift which is an inhibitor to realization, in Unix, of “the dream”.

But it was done outside of Unix and it quietly is running Fortune 100 workloads today … although many of them are implementing the “strangler pattern” to get those workloads moved to more conventional “modern” systems.

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#380

Post by fl7305 »

scotty79 wrote: post #359
fl7305 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know how a peaceful society should act if neigbour tries to kill them. I think if that's the case, they made a lot of mistakes already, if they reached that point. There are literally thousands of examples throughout history of smaller ethnic groups that were completely wiped out by their bigger and more aggressive neighbors. Do you think these small groups were provoking their neighbors? Why? Did they all…

> There are literally thousands of examples throughout history of smaller ethnic groups that were completely wiped out by their bigger and more aggressive neighbors. Exactly. Figting and killing didn't help them in any way. > Do you think these small groups were provoking their neighbors? Why? Did they all have a death wish? The wrong decision in that case was deciding to be separate from their neighbors despite the…

Edit: Reading your comments again, it does look like you are a pacifist?

> I think it's ok to take life if it's your own life or help someone to take their own if there are good reasons for it.

I read this as you think it is never OK to take a life in self defence, even if that means that tens of millions will be exterminated?

If so, you can disregard the rest:

> Figting and killing didn't help them in any way.

There are also many examples of much smaller ethnic groups who avoided complete extermination because they had a very competent army.

If you don't resist a neighbor who wants to exterminate your ethnic group, then the outcome is given. If you do resist, you still have a chance.

> The rest of the populace would just become the part of their (WW2 Germany) empire.

No. That is only true for northern and maybe western europe. Eastern europeans were considered vermin by them.

> They were multitude of ethnic groups who survived by getting assimilated into their stronger neighbors.

That can happen. Doesn't mean it's a given. I feel your overall logic reasoning leaves a lot to be desired? Do you strive to make logically sound arguments, or is that not important? If not, I don't think we can take this any further.

There is a sliding scale here. You have everything from pressure to align your country with the bigger neighbor all the way down to 100% extermination.

Germany's plans for the Slavic peoples were complete extermination. There was nothing the slavs could do or say to convince the German leadership to change their mind.

> I'm Polish. How much good do you think killing Germans did for Polish people in 1940?

Maybe you think that Germany didn't plan to exterminate all poles. Ok, let's just pretend that's the case. By advocating that Poland shouldn't have resisted, you're at the same time advocating handing over the 3 million Polish jews to Germany without a fight, knowing what would happen to them. Are you really OK with that?

> Stalin is a different thing. Just because Russians are terrible at everything. I'm still sure they wouldn't manage to keep whole Europe under their shoe for long. And if they did that would mean they seriously stepped up their game, so prosperity of sorts.

Sure, the Russians would have had a hell of a time keeping western europe under control. Stalin's answer to such problems were simply killing enough people until the problem disappeared. Not letting them do their own thing.

During the 1930's, Stalin sent out his underlings with orders to kill a certain quota in given area. The quotas were in the hundreds of thousands.

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