ReiserFS is a lesson in project naming. When I started in Linux full-time, back in the early 2000s, I was presented with different fs options - the installer did not give me any information on benefits, or on which ones were considered "stable". ext2 was available, but it also had a built-in version number, and I feared that once ext3 eventually rolled over, it might be incompatible. So I chose the fs that came with…
That’s why it’s best to only name things after dead people. Less surprises.
ReiserFS does have its benefits in highly specific use-cases. I have a filesystem with an absurd number of tiny files in it. I host a statically rendered wikipedia mirror. Tens of millions of gzipped html-files with a filesize in the range 1-5 Kb. ReiserFS is the only filesystem I know that deals even the slightest bit gracefully with this thanks to tail-packing.
Just mount a romfs image of site data as loopback.
Lots of people seem to turn up their nose at btrfs. Is there a reason for that? Was it perhaps launched before it was really ready and people still remember early versions?
Yes, the only real problems are edge cases. I use it all the time.
All problems are edge cases, to some degree or another. The only real question is how far out those edges are, and whether users are likely to bump into them.
I agree, I love BTRFS and have used it for ages, including some small scale production systems. But I know it still has some edge cases as you mention, which made me wonder: what is the impediment to having those cases fixed? BTRFS has been around long enough and even has some decent commercial support from a few vendors, so it seems like we can't just discount it as "it's open source and nobody is motivated to fix t…
edit: sorry, cheap shot at Facebook. I have no idea why BTRFS edge cases are not being fixed. What I do know is that ZFS recently released a feature specifically for the hobbyist/frugal community. The feature allows you to grow an existing RAID array, something a financially sound business would never do. So no customer of anyone supporting ZFS would ever use this, and it took significant effort of ZFS developers to…
Sarcastic comment adding nothing to the discussion. How rare.
ReiserFS does have its benefits in highly specific use-cases. I have a filesystem with an absurd number of tiny files in it. I host a statically rendered wikipedia mirror. Tens of millions of gzipped html-files with a filesize in the range 1-5 Kb. ReiserFS is the only filesystem I know that deals even the slightest bit gracefully with this thanks to tail-packing.
Trailing off topic, but what's the static wikipedia mirror? I contemplated making something like that some years ago when wikipedia was quite slow.
> The logical successor was supposed to be btrfs, but that project IMHO may never be ready for production use. https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Production_Users Facebook deployed it on millions of servers. Is that production enough? Synology NAS devices also use it.
Lots of people seem to turn up their nose at btrfs. Is there a reason for that? Was it perhaps launched before it was really ready and people still remember early versions?
Lots of us got burnt with data loss and aren’t willing to give it a chance again. Maybe it’s better now? I don’t have a reason to give it a second chance when there are plenty of stable alternatives that have saved my ass I’m the past instead of telling me I’m SOL.
Lots of people seem to turn up their nose at btrfs. Is there a reason for that? Was it perhaps launched before it was really ready and people still remember early versions?
Yes, the only real problems are edge cases. I use it all the time.
Edge cases like Raid5/6 which had the write hole issue approximately a decade after btrfs was released. At some point you say "This filesystem has lost so much of my data that I will never return to it."
> NB: Please don't discuss the personalities involved. Ah, but that's all I can think about when I read about reiserfs. For anyone who is unaware, the author, Hans Reiser, killed his wife and hid her body. There was a long and public investigation and he was found guilty. He later produced her body as part of a plea deal.
It's unfortunate that ReiserFS is named after Hans Reiser; other people were working on it too (well before the murder, see e.g. [1] for a crude overview), and there's nothing stopping anyone from maintaining and developing it, no matter what Hans Reiser did. Yet in large part due to the name, it's strongly linked to him :-/ If Theodore Ts'o would have been convicted of murder the ext* filesystems probably would have…
I worked with Hans Reiser before he want off to Russia to found his company in Russia (we were at an EDA company, not on the same project but in the same small group). ReiserFS was very much his vision, the core ideas were his, so the names are appropriate. Most of those other people you mention were once his employees. He was very driven, and at first he struggled to explain his ideas. I didn't want to believe that he killed his wife, though I knew he was very troubled and tended to see people as tools.
Personally I've always really liked ReiserFS. The collected storage of small files, the storage of the tails of files, the balanced tree structure, and the fast journaling gave better performance in reads, writes, boot time, and storage efficiency than most file systems. The focus on small files, which were and arguably still are most files on a typical system, was a big key to this. It made it ideal for storing thin…
It's great for small files, but it's also got some really nasty little corner cases. You do not store ReiserFS filesystem images on ReiserFS filesystems without encryption, or the next time you run fsck, you'll end up with the two filesystems oddly merged into something entirely useless. I'm not sure if that's been fixed, I got a bit tired of the exotica for general daily driver systems, and ext3/ext4 cover my needs…
This blew my mind. The bug is actually the main intended behaviour.