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Is it time to remove reiserfs?

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Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#141

Post by hbn »

codazoda wrote: post #28

> 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.

Props to you for pulling out the quote were he specifically said to not talk about that, and keep discussion about the APIs, proving that you read it, and then bring it into the thread anyway to derail it with the brutal murder topic.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#142

Post by londons_explore »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #116

I, for one, don't understand why can't they give Hans a computer and an internet connection and allow him to work on some open-source project.

There are interesting links to slavery and workhouses by allowing people to do actual labor from prison.

There is pretty much no way to allow people to 'volunteer' to do this kind of work without giving someone an incentive to get as many people into prison and using it as a giant slave work camp.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#143

Post by mark_undoio »

dale_glass wrote: post #50
mark_undoio wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that, having avoided a filesystem with a version number, you eventually ended up on Reiser 4! Shows how much some branding decisions can affect with you acquire a user or not, since you then stuck with the "brand" (though I presume quite a lot of time had passed and circumstances may have been different). I formed the impression that Hans Reiser's somewhat bombastic approach did not interface well wi…

There were grandiose plans indeed! Including things like plugins, yes, and ideas like exposing metadata about files (like MP3 artist tags and such) in virtual files. You'd `cat song.mp3/artist` or some such, treating the file as a virtual directory. There also was weird artwork to go with all of that: http://web.archive.org/web/20070219175315/http://www.namesys...

I really liked the files-as-directories behaviour. One of the objections I recall from the time was that this sort of behaviour would make more sense at VFS level.

I'd love to have this sort of functionality available (ISTR it has potentially other useful properties - e.g. new properties / metadata attached to files can automagically be handled by things like tar).

My memory says that concerns around overlapping file and directory behaviour caused pushback here. I think being able to hardlink to a directory was the issue (if every file can be a directory then how do you avoid directory cycles) but I may be mangling the details.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#144

Post by __s »

indymike wrote: post #39

ReiserFS has been stable for a long time, and especially useful for spinning metal disks that need to store lots and lots of small files. Not sure that there is a modern replacement that will be able to do this well.

Note that in the thread what happens is:

- someone posts a patch to enable refactoring which reiserfs code was blocking

- discussion goes into a deprecation plan, with someone suggesting reiserfs deprecation follow the same as xfs v4. These have formats have year 2038 bugs. Slated for code to be removed come 2030 by starting now

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#145

Post by __s »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #43

> There don't seem to be any fixes for user-spotted bugs since 2019. Does reiserfs still have a large install base that is just very happy with an old stable filesystem? Or have all its users migrated to new and exciting filesystems with active feature development? Data loss bugs sure sound exciting, but I'm old, and stable, and I prefer my file systems like myself.

& in the year 2038 you'll lose your mind?

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#146

Post by j16sdiz »

londons_explore wrote: post #137
dale_glass wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was the --rebuild-tree argument, which as I understand tries to fix an otherwise completely broken filesystem by searching for anything that looks like metadata and gluing it back together. I've not looked at reiserfs in many years though, so I could be mis-remembering here.

Seems like something pretty fixable too... Only scan areas of the disk which aren't part of already valid filesystem structures, including the users files.

ResierFS allow metadata in everywhere. That’s how they allow sharing a ext2fs and resierfs on same disk during conversion

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#147

Post by ajsnigrutin »

londons_explore wrote: post #137
dale_glass wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was the --rebuild-tree argument, which as I understand tries to fix an otherwise completely broken filesystem by searching for anything that looks like metadata and gluing it back together. I've not looked at reiserfs in many years though, so I could be mis-remembering here.

Seems like something pretty fixable too... Only scan areas of the disk which aren't part of already valid filesystem structures, including the users files.

And then the user deletes that file, and it's not a part of a file anymore, but is still stored somewhere on a disk.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#148

Post by Brian_K_White »

tinco wrote: post #104
gh02t wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I could already grow mdraid and reiserfs forever ago.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#149

Post by michaelt »

tombert wrote: post #42

Maybe someone with more understanding of kernel development could explain things to me. Does there have to be explicit kernel-level support to support a filesystem? Even if they remove support, does that stop anyone from releasing a kernel module and supporting it?

Depends if you want to boot from it, IIRC.

Your kernel has to have compiled-in support for the filesystem of the drive you store your kernel modules on.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#150

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #138
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Facebook doesn’t use it’s servers the same way we use our computers. They image machines in and out of existence. They don’t have file systems going through power loss on a weekly basis. They don’t upgrade the kernel on existing installations. They don’t expand their storage after the fact. If their machines fail, they don’t care - they’re completely fungible.

OP said production use. Can you define production use then?
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