Reiser4 FS: Ways Extra Rigor Can Consume Years of Your Life [2005] | Hacker News Reader

Reiser4 FS: Ways Extra Rigor Can Consume Years of Your Life [2005]

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ReiserFS was all that for a hot minute, but once tailpacking killed some files in /etc after a crash I never went back; XFS was a bit slower but way more reliable.

And no wife murder.

Older XFS filesystems have a 2038 problem.

There is no upgrade to the new format; they must be dumped and reloaded.

I'm sorry if this is you. I don't think there are any upgrade paths.

XFS V5 filesystems can be upgraded: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/XFS#Year_2038_timestamp_support...

Edit: I see that V5 is the upstream default since "only" ~2015, so indeed there are likely many V4 filesystems still around.

Long ago I moved to ZFS, so I don't have that upgrade issue.

SQLite is emphatic that it is faster than filesystems for storing smaller amounts of binary data.

https://www.sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html

Original subtitle was too long: The Reiser4 Filesystem Ways In Which Extra Rigor In Scientific Methodology Can Consume Years Of Your Life, And How The Result Can Be So Very Worthwhile

Hans was a genius, and a nut. Sometimes they come as a package. The claim was his wife used him for a green card and he flipped when he found out. But she also had his child, crazy how things turn out. Apparently he went out and bought a book on how to get away with murder and paid on his credit card right after, which is fairly revealing on a few levels. But at the time reiserFS was an astonishing feat of engineering and by a mile the best filesystem linux had

Reiserfs was pretty good, at the time. At one point, it got nerfed by Linux maintainers introducing bad changes against Hans' advice, resulting in damage to the filesystem reputation.

But Reiser4, which never got merged, was insane levels of amazing in latency and ops/second, and yet excellent in throughput still.

Reiser4 was a team effort, and the other participants have been maintaining it irrespective of Reiser's imprisonment.

Today, there are some legitimately non-crap filesystem efforts, but they are either not mainlined and not very active (Tux3) or not Linux (Hammer2 from Dragonfly).

XFS could be made less crap; The main complaint I remember from Hans (dentries shouldn't be packed with inodes) does still stand. Metadata work such as a simple ls on a non-cached directory taking forever and a day.

I am most hopeful that when Matt Dillon declares Hammer2 done, porting efforts will make it widespread in open source operating systems.

I’m at best a layman when it comes to file systems, would you explain what makes Hammer2 so interesting comparatively?

needs a [2005] in the title

done, thanks

Wait didn’t he kill his wife?

Yes.

Missing an important fact

Could you elaborate?

What about the "wife murderer" aspect?

How do you get over the `eww' factor?

This article is 17 years old. I don't know why you'd ReiserFS today, even ignoring its infamous author.

Its removal from the Linux kernel is also being discussed, since it suffers from the year 2038 problem, amongst other reasons.

Tail packing, probably ReiserFS' most famous feature, is also performed by btrfs.

First American dictionary was made by a murderer.

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