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Is it time to remove reiserfs?

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Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#61

Post by sterwill »

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…

That's one heck of an edge case! How does fsck manage to completely confuse filesystem metadata and data like this? Surely this is only if there's corruption in the (outer) filesystem, right?

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#62

Post by cestith »

pmarreck wrote: post #38
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…

Hear, hear on replacing reiserfs with bcachefs. Kent Overstreet could use the support, the project looks good, and to my knowledge he is not a murderer.

The salacious details are always part of this discussion and outside of a very carefully scoped conversation like was requested on the list I think that's always going to happen. On just a technical basis, though, I think bcachefs pays a lot of attention to many of the same issues ReiserFS does, gets more current maintenance, and is maintained more along the lines of kernel interfaces other filesystems use. That last one is the strongest point made in the email to the list.

The advantage of having the creator, designer, and lead maintainer available among free society is definitely real. Regardless of the murder - even if we can separate the man's technical work from the rest of his life activities - he's not doing a lot of work on his creation while he's in custody. He's certainly not going to be furloughed to hackathons or conferences from a murder sentence.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#63

Post by captainmuon »

prima-facie wrote: post #48
DocTomoe wrote: post #22

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…

Maybe it's a sort of Teutonic tradition to name things after yourself. e.g. Hetzner, ReiserFS.

Well, there is also Linux, DebIan, Knoppix (Klaus Knopper, admittedly also a German)...

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#64

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

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…

> 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.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#65

Post by marginalia_nu »

amelius wrote: post #59
marginalia_nu wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A filesystem is a database.

So what people think of as a database is a database inside a database?

Yeah. It's like that old Xzibit meme.

File systems aren't relational databases, but more like NoSQL half a lifetime before it was cool. They're typically backed by the same data structures and solve the same problems.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#66

Post by Beltalowda »

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.

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 lived on, as it's not "TsoFS".

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20060318185107fw_/http://www.nam...

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#68

Post by actionfromafar »

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…

Damn, I was bit by this, I had forgotten about it because it was such a long time ago.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#69

Post by jordigh »

"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 years means it has some. There are installs of it out there. Wilcox is considering breaking userspace for some users.

Linux is famous, famous for keeping backwards compatibility for almost everything forever. The stories of Linux backwards compat are up there with stories of Windows still supporting AUX and CON and other special file names. Is "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE" still worthy enough to be shouted at the top of your email lungs?

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#70

Post by prmoustache »

andix wrote: post #26
DocTomoe wrote: post #22

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.

Well in the case of last name unless those dead peoples was the last one standing with the surname there is always the possibility of a descendant or someone from a different branch of the family name tree commiting bad things.

Add to that some people sometimes decide to give a famouse surname as a firstname for their kids. There is a non negligible number of people sporting the Lafayette, Napoleon, Lincoln as first name for example that could do something bad anytime.

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