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
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.
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 43.2 ms ] threadHow do you get over the `eww' factor?
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.
And no wife murder.
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.
Edit: I see that V5 is the upstream default since "only" ~2015, so indeed there are likely many V4 filesystems still around.
https://www.sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html
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.