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Is it time to remove reiserfs?

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Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#171

Post by daneel_w »

lbriner wrote: post #46
daneel_w wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Pretty much everyone is aware of the elephant in the room. It's just not relevant to address said elephant since it has no bearing on technical discussions, which is what the author of the e-mail thread pro-actively underlined.

The fact he is a murderer might not be relevant to the discussion per-se but his unavailability to help fixes/improvements to be made is a big issue as the author of the FS. I don't know anything about it and whether other contributors are able to give as much input as he could but judging by the comments of unfixed bugs and few commits, it would sound like it is a big risk of stagnation. No?

Everyone understands the implications for a piece of software when its principal developer disappears. Wallowing in the details won't change anything. It's been years already.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#172

Post by pdmccormick »

not2b wrote: post #119
Beltalowda wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can still remember discussing the case while hanging around the student union office at school. I wanted to believe he didn't do it, in part because there would be a chance that the children might be reunited with their mother, and also because of a youthful naivety about the supposed honesty and integrity of someone of strong technical competence and achievement. I had been running reiserfs for years already by that point so I definitely had the "my team" bias. It's a sobering lesson that I continue to reflect upon to this day.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#173

Post by spookthesunset »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #166
ComputerGuru wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If their machines fail, they don’t care This myth is being perpetuated despite btrfs devs (who work at facebook) stating the exact opposite many times over. Every FS corruption and weird behavior is put aside and investigated. They very much do care. https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/03fbbb9a-7e74-fc49-c663-3272... Please read the whole thread before repeating this nonsense, or at least every email sent there by Jose…

As a tl,dr:

“Also keep in mind we pay really close attention to burn rates for our drives, because obviously at our scale it translates to millions of dollars. Btrfs has improved our burn rates with the compression, as the write amplification goes drastically down, thus extending the life of the drives.”

As with anything it comes down to money. Yes a machine going down doesn’t impact the cluster but it does impact their wallet. Every failure of a disk costs money and on the scale of the big boys that can add up to big money.

So while “the system” doesn’t care about drive failures the accountants and CFO’s absolutely care.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#174

Post by daneel_w »

blablabla123 wrote: post #152
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.

Yeah that's also why I stopped using it. Why didn't they just fork it and change the name? I don't get it. FWIW at some point it also had quite severe stability issues. I'm sure those were solved but that might have contributed to the fact why there was no effort to fork it but instead people went with ZFS, XFS and eventually ext4

Does superficial moralism and applying guilt by association somehow improve your life?

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#175

Post by samus »

jordigh wrote: post #69

"WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE" https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 I was surprised to see that Linux has in fact removed other filesystems in the past (and I had to look up the word "senescent"). So the real news to me here is that a somewhat "major" break in userspace is being considered. Sure, ReiserFS might not be getting a lot of new installs, but the fact that people have submitted fixes to it within the past few y…

There is a huge difference between introducing glitches in syscalls and deprecating support for something self-contained like a filesystem. The former is sudden and potentially impacts an unspecified, though presumably huge, number of users. The latter is a filesystem that will be put on a deprecation schedule that will literally take half a decade to go through.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#176

Post by emaginniss »

__s wrote: post #145
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?

That's a generous assessment

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#177

Post by emaginniss »

leephillips wrote: post #122
fest wrote: post #54

What other filesystems have checksums for data? Last time I looked, after a silent SSD failure that I only noticed because some .so files were affected, the only options were btrfs and reiserfs (I think ZFS required a custom kernel at that time). The incident was really eye-opening in how fragile was my data: if .so files were not affected, I would have continued to use the system and erroneous data would silently be…

Git? Since I put pretty much everything into Git, it’s like another filesystem overlayed on my normal filesystem.

And has the appropriate performance

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#178

Post by patrakov »

Syonyk wrote: post #51
cestith wrote: post #29

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…

From the same standpoint, btrfs is not sane either. You cannot dd it to a different block device, even when unmounted. When the kernel sees two btrfs filesystems with the same UUID on two different block devices, it thinks they are one filesystem, and corrupts both.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#179

Post by samus »

mrweasel wrote: post #162
chousuke wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing a kernel driver does not break userspace. I mean, yes, your filesystem becomes inaccessible, but any programs that you could run if you could access that filesystem by some other means would still function. None of them depend on ReiserFS specifically for their function. Userspace breakage is more about changing interfaces in such a way that applications using that interface change their behaviour somehow. T…

You're technically correct, but it would be a "fun" surprise to update your operating system and then not be able to boot because your filesystem isn't supported anymore.

Such big changes rarely happen overnight. If someone really knows about and runs ReiserFS, they can be expected to read up on release notes for major upgrades of their distro. And it's far from an everyday event to even consider deprecating a filesystem. The fact that we are having this conversation rather proves that.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#180

Post by chungy »

mrweasel wrote: post #162
chousuke wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing a kernel driver does not break userspace. I mean, yes, your filesystem becomes inaccessible, but any programs that you could run if you could access that filesystem by some other means would still function. None of them depend on ReiserFS specifically for their function. Userspace breakage is more about changing interfaces in such a way that applications using that interface change their behaviour somehow. T…

You're technically correct, but it would be a "fun" surprise to update your operating system and then not be able to boot because your filesystem isn't supported anymore.

If you're running a rolling release, you should already expect this kind of experience.

If you run a stable distribution, you stay on the older kernel series until you upgrade the entire OS, by which time the release notes would say "Removed support for ReiserFS"

And then there you can do the "tar -c -C /reiserfs . | tar -x -C /ext4" dance (or whatever other preferred copying mechanism), before the OS upgrade.

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