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Is it time to remove reiserfs?

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Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#91

Post by trasz »

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...

FWIW, this was eventually implemented in Solaris - that's how named data streams work.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#92

Post by gjm11 »

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.

I don't know about you, but although I too am old and stable I have plenty of data-loss bugs, and I'm running on hardware that needs regular downtime and constant maintenance in order not to fail catastrophically. I therefore don't want my file systems too much like myself.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#93

Post by ericbarrett »

Frost1x wrote: post #25

ReiserFS is a conversational litmus test I like to casually and indirectly name drop in technical interview discussions surrounding the world of Linux, file systems, and storage to fish and see if someone actually had been actively working in the domain circa 2000ish when there was a lot of hype and criticism bubbling surrounding performance with large sets of small files. Admittedly, it's not a great signal if the c…

Sadly, I don't think this is a good signal for anything anymore except being past a certain age and having been around Linux at the time. ReiserFS hasn't been relevant for fifteen years, as during its heydey it was quite unstable and after the incident development stopped completely. I say this as somebody who was in the storage industry in the early 2000s and worked with an engineer who personally knew Hans Reiser.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#94

Post by asddubs »

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…

don't murder your wife, got it. this is the kind of high level advice i come here for

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#95

Post by gh02t »

pnutjam wrote: post #87
api wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 those long tail problems." Is there some kind of design issue that makes them hard?

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#96

Post by kzrdude »

pnutjam wrote: post #87
api wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is ENOSPC still included as one of those edge cases?

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#97

Post by sp332 »

more_corn wrote: post #35
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.

Isn’t it relevant though? The sole author and support person is AFK for the foreseeable future.

Besides the fact that other people have been maintaining it, he was sentenced to 15 years in 2008. He could be out next year.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#98

Post by samus »

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?

Indeed, some database servers (Oracle IIRC) don't use a filesystem, but write to a filesystem partition directly.

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#99

Post by stevekemp »

Frost1x wrote: post #25

ReiserFS is a conversational litmus test I like to casually and indirectly name drop in technical interview discussions surrounding the world of Linux, file systems, and storage to fish and see if someone actually had been actively working in the domain circa 2000ish when there was a lot of hype and criticism bubbling surrounding performance with large sets of small files. Admittedly, it's not a great signal if the c…

I can almost see that being useful, but at the same time I'd be more curious about the current knowledge somebody possessed than stuff from back in the day. It's also a bit of an (accidental?) age-test.

It's like asking about Pamela Jones, from Groklaw, and her red dress. Fun trivia, but it tells you nothing about a person's current technical skills (or even their past ones!), just their ability to remember random names/facts, and excludes newer/younger staff.

Back then reiserfs was too new, and therefore not something I'd consider deploying to production systems. These days? Obsolete in practice. So I guess there would be many like me who have a vague memory that it was gonna be cool, with plugins and stuff, but who never actually used it or tried it.

(Maybe it's different if you're interviewing/grilling somebody for a very FS/Storage-heavy NAS-producing company, but there I'd expect conservatism to be highly appreciated?)

Re: Is it time to remove reiserfs?

#100

Post by vidarh »

Jiejeing wrote: post #18
marginalia_nu wrote: post #10

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.

Indeed, I had a partition with a huge number of small files in the ext3 era, and reiserfs was the only one even remotely able to perform decently. I stumbled upon it last week and was happy and surprised to see that reiserfs was not removed.

We had millions of users of a mail service with everything stored in Maildirs. Reiserfs handled it fantastically on hardware ridiculously slow by modern standards. But I've not used it for maybe 15 years...
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