The ReiserFS Filesystem (2000) | Hacker News Reader

The ReiserFS Filesystem (2000)

p-nand-q.com

31 pointsluu59 comments

I was a big fan of ReiserFS “back in the day”.

While many are no doubt aware of the trial and conviction for his wife’s murder, I find that almost nobody is aware that a successor (Reiser4) was also in development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiser4

I believe it is still in active development and they refuse to change the name for some odd reason. It’s like if kdenlive was named “Weinstein” wouldn’t you want to change it?

I mean, I get it. I truly do, but part of me hates this idea of names being "burned".

This name is a direct link to the person, and he should not be immortalised like that. But other cases (CockroachDB is one) I think people go overboard with getting offended at names.

Names typically have power when we only associate them with a single thing. If we have many things with similar names then one of them being terrible, no good, or awful does not directly come to mind when the word arises.

> But other cases (CockroachDB is one) I think people go overboard with getting offended at names.

Like, because they’re repulsed by cockroaches?

Or people getting offended by GIMP.

> But other cases (CockroachDB is one) I think people go overboard with getting offended at names.

But with this name there is a 0.1% chance in any enterprise setting that managers would accept usage of such a DB. At least as long as it's not as mainstream as maybe Redis or MongoDB. (If something is popular enough, the name is to be accepted)

I mean, MongoDB has a pretty unfortunate name depending on where you are from...

https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/mongo/

Didn't seem to get in it's way too much.

Part of me still wants to create a database called MondoDB. Tagline "The Gnarly database for all your Righteous data!"

Candygram for MongoDB.

This is why the paid version of "Agent Ransack" is instead called "File Locator Pro".

If I ever get around to releasing any of my own little projects they will have deliberately slightly offensive names to take advantage of this as a user filtering property. If at some point I want the difficult & demanding sort of user who is going to take issue with a project name, I can rename at that time. (of course if a project is intended to be breadwinner that may be a poor strategy!).

I don't meant to be rude but from what I have seen, american people seem highly influenced by their corporates to remain "clean" without personality or quirkiness that isn't approved. I have seen this leak into many critics (may be biased due to the population size) where they sometimes expect a hobby project to have professional naming on some really arbitrary principles that are specific to them. Just odd to me or find a product unappealing to the name not sounding "clean".

Cockroachdb sounds really intriguing to me, enough that I checked their website and read a few posts. First thought that came to mind when hearing it was that the db might have something to do based on resilience and replication like a cockroach.

I have my roots in Germany and Italy where it’s pretty common to either have or know people who have “historically notorious” surnames, and therefore the whole idea of “burning names” never caught on (fortunately, I might add).

Except Hitler.

Hitler was a rare (maybe even unique?) name to begin with, being a spelling variation of "Hiedler" for unknown reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alois_Hitler#Change_of_surname

'Adolf' on the other hand went basically extinct.

That's much easier with a first name because they aren't typically passed down. Some families do to an extent, but not like last names.

With the exception of adolf, hitler and other evil masterminds. To some degree typical mobbing-names could be also seen as burned.

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

They found people named "Bomb, war, Göbbels, Speer, Keitel, Heß, Bormann, Eichmann" to run for Parliament.

Yes, it's a parody. They got many heat and attention for it.

Sure, but the names are real.

Yes, and? Not everyone changed their name after WW2. Not every name is as burnend as the commonly known big evils. Point is many did change their names and people with burnend names receive some discrimination for their names.

Eichmann? Heß? Bormann?

Neither "commonly known", nor "evil"?

> But other cases (CockroachDB is one)

And GIMP. Some people just work so hard to get offended by an acronym that happens to also be an almost-unknown slang, that they created a fork called Glimpse.

That project declares that the name alone prevented adoption by thousands of companies and universities. If this is true, we should expect Glimpse adoption to skyrocket immediately.

> Some people just work so had to get offended by an acronym [...]

That's nothing compared to German law: You won't see a single license plate there that has the numbers 18, 28 or 88 on it. Although numbers like 318 or 288 would be fine ...

Swedish license plates (currently in the form of "ABC 12E" are screened for 3-letter combos like "CIA", "KGB", "KKK" and of course "KUK". Such plates are not issued.

Belgian license plates also have 3 letters, and there is a list of 99 forbidden combinations. Most of them are slurs, swears, political parties or things like SEX or BOM (bomb). No idea about some of them, like KKQ.

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgisch_kenteken#%22Verboden%...

Here in NC, license plates are usually in the form [a-z][a-z][a-z]-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]

For example, DBX-2399 or something.

Anyway, apparently they just rotate through the first triplet in a completely mechnical fashion... so you go from DBX to DBY to DBZ to DCA, yadda, yadda...

Logical consequence? At some point, license plates were made that started with WTF. And of course somebody took offense, called the DMV and complained, and it caused a big brouhaha. I'm thinking "are you freaking kidding me?" Talk about a "WTF moment".

https://www.wxii12.com/article/potentially-offensive-license...

the numbers 18, 28 or 88

Wikipedia tells me that 88 is a code number for "Heil Hitler".

But what is the significance of 18 or 28?

> But what is the significance of 18 or 28?

18 Adolf Hitler

28 Blood and Honour

Same as with 88, the numbers represent the position in the alphabet.

In the American extremist community, 14 would also be on that list, representative of the "Fourteen Words": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words

As those things go, 14/88 is a relatively common dog whistle.

This is an unfair expectation. Glimpse has taken off in my school however.

> that happens to also be an almost-unknown slang

Perhaps where you live.

Where I do, it's easily the most common slur for people with physical disabilities, and it's considered very offensive. I do consciously avoid using or talking about GIMP at the office, using it only when I'm working from home instead, specifically to avoid offending coworkers. This isn't me working hard at getting offended; it's me putting a minimum of effort into not upsetting my colleagues.

The folks who run GIMP are absolutely free to keep the name. But I think it would only be mature of them, and fans of the software, too, to be understanding of how others will perceive it, and not get defensive about the name adversely impacting the app's popularity.

Funnily enough, both projects were started by the same people.

I wouldn't consider the name "Reiser" to be burned in most contexts. It's a normal name. But in this case the name is reminding us that the product was literally lead and developed by a murderer.

To be perfectly frank, there’s no getting around the fact that a convicted murderer designed this filesystem, so… I don’t really see why changing it would make much of a difference.

I don’t really get the “burned names” thing; it verges on “cancel culture” (which, from my distant cultural remove, strikes me as rather insane).

I carry a surname uncomfortably close to that of widely-known Nazi Reichsminister, and in both Germany and Italy (countries I herald from) it is not uncommon for several acquaintances to have surnames with sinister historic overtones.

It just happens. People don’t think too much about it.

I agree in principle but in practice and where you’re ‘selling’ something, why rub people’s noses in it if you don’t have to.

Imo it should be burned. Not for everything but just for new versions of projects he himself worked on.

Imagine if Victoria from Victoria's secret turned out to be an axe murderer and they kept the business name.

The name is not the issue, but the the nameholder associated with it and the project.

> like if kdenlive was named “Weinstein”

At this point though, how many people know the name for that reason? Even at the time, the case hardly had the public notoriety that the Weinstein case has now.

> refuse to change the name for some odd reason

Changing the name could be detrimental as it could be mistaken for a new and relatively untested filesystem rather than one that has a long history.

You don't get to die on a hill if you don't stay on the hill.

There is even Reiser5: https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/ee55ce28-2434-d3c6-0d2d-2ed1...

The real innovation of ReiserFS was to set up a development environment where they could develop, profile a new feature, repeat, multiple times a day. That's how they got such an amazingly performant FS: Short feedback cycles.

Is there any more information on how they accomplished this?

"Plugins"

https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/V4#Software_Libre_...

https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/V4#The_Software_En...

They have some text where it shows they thought deeply about the meaning of names and domains, and how to develop file systems, what is important, etc.

Thank you for the link - the whole page is a really interesting read.

I found it very useful for transparent partition compression a few years ago (on a bootable usb stick). ZFS takes more system memory. Nowadays I would consider F2FS compression. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=F2FS-Com...

https://sudonull.com/post/126002-As-I-wrote-LZ4-compression-...

https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Reiser4_Howto

As I read this page, 19 comments are about the name, 1 comment is about the file system itself.

If the name were changed:

> Previously known as ReiserFS.

> The guy who made it killed his wife.

Reiser is up for parole this year. The hearing is in March. I myself don't have a lot of public respectability, but if you are a CS PhD or occupy a notable position at a tech company you might be able to mail the parole board. Murdering your wife is detestable but I don't think he will ever find another woman to marry him and I don't think he would commit murder under any other circumstances. I don't think he is a continuing danger to society and the world would benefit if Reiser were allowed to continue his work.

there's a lot of "don't think" in your post, and tbh, you're talking about someone who premeditatively killed his wife, hid her body, researched how to get away with murder, plead not guilty, and finally accepted a plea for 2nd degree murder in exchange for giving police the location of his wife's body.

so, "if you're a CS PhD or occupy a notable position at a tech company", i would recommend some introspection on what's more important: justice or a filesystem.

personally, i'm on the side of justice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Is it really 'justice' if he could have only gotten three years with that plea agreement he turned down?

If anything he's the victim of his own Asperger's for thinking that proof in a court of law is the same thing as a logical proof.

He's gonna be homeless, without family, with a 60 million judgement over his head. He's spent over a decade in prison. Justice has been served. If he gets out, he can start earning some money to pay his kids (who are the major living victims of his crime) that restitution AND he can do cutting edge computer science research that benefits the entire Linux community.

Sometimes justice needs to be more than just retributive.

I managed a system that really benefitted from Rieser. Reiserfs's idea of a "small file" was 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than most other filesystems, and this system stored map tiles of the entire globe, many, many of which were 37 byte long all blue tiles. Reiserfs stored it in a fraction of what ext or xfs would take.

Ideally some meta-tile format would have been used, like with mod_tile, or some deduplication or hard linking, but reiserfs just handled it like a champ.

Hopefully development can continue again in March.

Feature comparison of file systems -- no other file system has all the features of ReiserFS or Reiser4:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_fil...

"Murders Your Wife"

... How did that make it into Wikipedia? How has it not been removed!?

Edit: Oh, that's an old version. My mistake.

Looks like ZFS does? (especially now that it does have native encryption)

You linked to an old version (from 2008!) of that wiki page that contains vandalism (a column labeled "Murders your wife"). Why?

Given your comment "no other file system has all the features of ReiserFS or Reiser4", I am guessing it is a crude and disgusting "joke".

diff between the page you linked and the current version: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_fil...

Who cares who wrote it? Good code is good code, and Reiser is still often the best option for storing lots of small files.

I don't think it makes sense to change the name, but it's rude and vulgar to deliberately link to an old version of a page that makes fun of someone's murder.

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