Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel • Hacker News Board

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#281

Post by bombcar » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 7:35 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #53

hinkley wrote: post #3

I thought the usual solution when we disagree irreconcilably with a maintainer was to fork and rename? I always thought it a bit weird that we were naming parts of Linux after people. We already did that once and that kinda uses up your freebie. Seems like everyone quit Hans and nobody rallied the project back together.

> I thought the usual solution when we disagree irreconcilably with a maintainer was to fork and rename? Yes. But that requires someone, or a group, to take responsibility for that and support the fork. Maintaining a filesystem can be a complex undertaking. > Seems like everyone quit Hans and nobody rallied the project back together. I think it was more like he was the core of the project with others contributing. On…

Remember that XFS was added to the kernel in 2001, and was already well-supported by most (all?) distros by the time the Reiser3/4 issue was beginning.

People who encountered issues with Reiser3 usually migrated away, and never looked back, Reiser4 was already DOA imo before all the other stuff happened.

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#282

Post by jbverschoor » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 7:36 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #254

ghaff wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an argument for copy-on-write filesystem options but it's pretty hard to argue there needs to be more than 2 or 3 "traditional" journaling filesystems like maybe ext4 and XFS.

His letter contends that ReiserFS was intended to be more than just a filesystem, and that jibes with what he was saying about it at the time. I think that it was meant to be a queryable database that happened to be good at implementing traditional filesystem semantics, but also optimally useful through some other kind of API.

Only 5-10 years after BeFS.

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#283

Post by revel » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 7:37 PM UTC

eql5 wrote: post #182

revel wrote: post #94

The contents of the letter are interesting in their own right, but there are 2 aspects that strike me as particularly interesting. First off, he doesn't seem to regret killing his wife, more the consequences of his crime. He doesn't mention her by name or say that she didn't deserve it. Secondly, the person he's corresponding with, Fredrick Brennan is fascinating in his own right. He's one of the 3 central characters…

> the ridiculous QAnon QAnon is a creation of MSM, and doesn't even exist, hence it's really ridiculous. The real thing is called the Q intel drops (many times just questions), inviting followers to do research on their own, which is never ridiculous.

QAnon (often shortened to Q) is the name given to the persona that has been adopted by a few different individuals and is almost certainly currently controlled by Ron (principally) and Jim (secondarily) Watkins. Calling the posts "Q intel drops" is coded language the tells me you are intimately aware of the QAnon conspiracy group. Let me be clear: Q is some random dudes larping on the internet to give their own pathetic lives some level of importance they do not deserve. Q is a fictionalized persona.

I don't mean this as an insult, but after looking through your post history, you should consider psychological counseling. I recognize the coded language you are using. I'm sorry to tell you this, but you are in a cult. These people are taking advantage of you.

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#284

Post by bena » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 7:38 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #245

bena wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on what you're looking to get away with. If you're looking to get away with orchestrating the murder of someone you know, it can be difficult. However, if you're just looking to get away with murdering someone in general, that's surprisingly easy. Just go a town or two over and knife a random someone in a random parking lot. Police success rates are comically low.

Police success rates on completely random murders are insanely low partially because they're insanely rare. Complete success is something like 50% overall, but in general in many of those cases that "aren't solved" they know who did it, they also know they can't prove it.

Considering the number of people in prison who get exonerated, I'm glad that the ones "they know" did it aren't actually in jail. Because that seems like random chance that they're actually right.

But it's also why I qualified my statements. That if you're looking to kill a particular person, that's way harder than "getting away with murder" in general.

Police only have so many tools at their disposal. And if there is no link between victim and perpetrator, the job becomes way harder.

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#285

Post by hulitu » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 7:40 PM UTC

__david__ wrote: post #265

starfallg wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ReiserFS and BTRFS are the only 2 Linux filesystems that truly ate my data. Everything else I was able to substantially recover from.

I had XFS eat some data once. I somehow got it into a state where it wouldn't mount and wouldn't fsck. Luckily for me it was "just" my backup disk, so after a week of fighting with it I just gave up and reformatted (as ext4) and didn't end up losing much. Was eye opening though. I'd rather have a slightly less featureful fs that I have a chance of recovering…

I had the same issue with xfs. Seems to be fixed recently.

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#286

Post by jbverschoor » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 7:43 PM UTC

Athas wrote: post #102

revel wrote: post #94

The contents of the letter are interesting in their own right, but there are 2 aspects that strike me as particularly interesting. First off, he doesn't seem to regret killing his wife, more the consequences of his crime. He doesn't mention her by name or say that she didn't deserve it. Secondly, the person he's corresponding with, Fredrick Brennan is fascinating in his own right. He's one of the 3 central characters…

He mentions her by name in the first paragraph (after the cover letter): > I don’t post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006. He doesn't get into whether/why he is sorry: > I am very sorry for my crime–a proper apology would be off topic for this forum, but available to any who ask. Hans Reiser has previously explained why he believed the murder was justified. It is not clear to me, from t…

He regrets “killing” other’s dreams about working on his file system.

He’s a psychopath. The whole write up does not discuss anything that was asked and he just wants recognition and fame for inventing something (queryable file system) that was already released long before that, namely BeFS, by the real file system god, Dominic Giampaolo who also wrote APFS

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#287

Post by jbverschoor » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 7:46 PM UTC

mvanveen wrote: post #162

Reading this I think it is interesting to compare and contrast this write up with the evangelism of Richard Hipp and his success with SQLite. It seems to me that Hans Reiser's write up still has a lot of leaps and lurches, both emotionally and in terms of reasoning. I felt there was a lot of instances where he expresses remorse for key hiring decisions or meetings between stakeholders in the open source world, but wi…

Well, was only 5-10 years late for a database-like file system..

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#288

Post by not2b » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 7:47 PM UTC

jeffrallen wrote: post #207

not2b wrote: post #70

I worked with Hans Reiser in the late 90s. He was a contractor with the company that I was working for, and he was doing that (working on logic synthesis for FPGAs) by day and trying to start his company at night. He was very passionate about his technical ideas, though in those days he had difficulty explaining them, so I went back and forth about whether he was a genius or a crank (I decided that he was some combin…

I met him at the same place at the same time and had the same reaction to him. Are you me?

I don't think I'm you. :-)

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#289

Post by bombcar » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 7:52 PM UTC

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 says in the letter, read it) about namespaces were quite up and coming (WinFS had similar concepts, mind you). Other aspects about journaling were also "ahead of the time" but part of the reason he got their first was not making data integrity the number 1 feature (which you can still do with modern filesystems, but Reiser3 pioneered the "journal metadata only" which makes FSCK fast, and access fast, but can result in corrupt data. Most other filesystems default to slow and correct, with an option to go fast if you want.

XFS was similar, but things like ZFS are more powerful in almost orthogonal ways.

His "dream" of the one true storage that melds RAM, ROM, disk, cache, etc has yet to come to be, though you could argue that some of the S3 style interfaces are closer.

Re: Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

#290

Post by 0x457 » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 7:56 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #246

0x457 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is he supposed to refer to her? ex-wife is incorrect. By name doesn't provide enough context for people that don't know about him. The fact is - he killed his wife. > To all practical intents and purposes she was no longer 'his wife' It doesn't work like that, though. My soon-to-be-ex-wife is still listed as spouse on our health insurance because I can't remove her until the divorce is finalized. I still have to…

That's besides the point, the question is whether you still think of her and refer to her as 'your wife'. And then extrapolate to the - obviously hypothetical - situation in which you murdered your soon-to-be-ex-wife and still refer to her as 'my wife' many years later. It's bizarre that this needs to be spelled out. This isn't a legal issue, it's a bit of insight in how Reiser feels about the person he murdered.

Well, in my mind, he is referring to the state at the point of murder. The fact that they were going through the divorce process isn't important here (to us bystanders, to the investigator it's a motive).

I think this is just bs for his next parole hearing tho.