Reiser5 Pursuing Selective File Migration For Moving Hot Files To High Performance Disks

[starshipeleven]

And if they finally did that, those discussion would be over.

That's a great reason not to. Discussions like that are free publicity

[gnarlin]

Hey, here's an idea. How about renaming the ReiserFS so that it can have more than a snowflake's chance in hell of getting merged into Linus's kernel tree? Just a thought.

[ferry]

I don't quite get why reiserfs even bother with that. I was under the impression that hot data tracking was supposed to be a general feature under the VFS layer.

That was a later (not so great) idea.

I found 3 attempts from IBM to get patches reviewed and then they turned silent.

[NotMine999]

I wonder if there will come a point when Shishkin decides he has done enough of the work to rename the project. If he did, is there enough unique value to the project as is that it would be accepted or wanted upstream?

For a start, to be included in upstream means it would need to conform to the coding guidelines of upstream. Any long-time follow of Phoronix and these forums has seen many projects submitted to upstream for inclusion in the kernel that go through multiple rounds of code review in LKML. Even a recent feature for the kernel is on something like it's 30th revision. I don't know the status of ReiserFS compliance with Linux kernel coding standards, but it's a box that has to be checked.

The name might not be an issue to upstream distributions since they can hide that behind their fancy desktop UI. Perhaps it's the Linux example of NIH - "not invented here". Look at Red Hat; if it ain't woven or weaveable into systemd and their other world domination efforts, then Red Hat (now IBM) does not want it. Same with Ubuntu. Not sure about SuSE. Debian is sort of a "fence sitter"; they might include it if someone offers to maintain it long-term. And Gentoo probably has some flavor of ReiserFS, but I'm too lazy to recompile to find out

I honestly think one of the biggest issues getting ReiserFS into upstream kernels is the lack of "standout feature that people really want". Ext4FS has "longevity", "stability", and "backwards compatibility with Ext3FS" as some of it's hallmarks; it just plain works. btrfs has "ooo shiny newness" and "it's not ExtFS whatever" as some of it's hallmarks that attracts to younger Linux user crowd. IMHO zfs and xfs have niche uses; most desktop users might not use them or care about them unless they built their own NAS.

Unfortunately for ReiserFS, any outstanding hallmarks are outweighed by "bad memories" and possibly the refusal of some to "grow up, get over it, and get on with coding & development".

Phoronix articles on features and benchmarks leave the impression that if it wasn't for Reiser's involvement and what he did, this would be accepted and possibly even chosen by one or more distros for their default by now, but, alternate timelines aside, is there any real hope for this going mainstream?

[Teggs]

I wonder if there will come a point when Shishkin decides he has done enough of the work to rename the project. If he did, is there enough unique value to the project as is that it would be accepted or wanted upstream? Phoronix articles on features and benchmarks leave the impression that if it wasn't for Reiser's involvement and what he did, this would be accepted and possibly even chosen by one or more distros for their default by now, but, alternate timelines aside, is there any real hope for this going mainstream?

[skeevy420]

So you're telling me that the only thing stopping you from using Reiser4/5 is the name? I don't believe that. You will keep avoiding ReiserFS, even if it was named after you. And I think that goes for most people: ReiserFS doesn't have much to offer that others don't, so people won't be using it regardless of the name.

As far as general purpose root file systems go, Reiser is one of the better ones to use. It was one of the first Linux file systems to offer compression on the fly and, IIRC, possibly the only native Linux FS that supports both compression and encryption within the file system itself with its plugin system and not via a layer like LUKS (ZFS does too, but I'm being really technical on the native part). Those two features alone make it worth using for the average user. Keeps your disk private and maximizes space -- add in snapshotting and that covers what the average user needs.

My only problem with using it is that it doesn't have the backing that other Linux file systems have at the distribution level. I reckon that's why other people don't use it as much.

The distributions don't use it because there's a stigma against the file system over it's name.

We're (users) not using it because of its name because they're (distros) not using it because of its name.

If it had a name change then some distribution might pick support it which would give users confidence to use it. It has a lot of the cool buzzword features that we want file systems to have, but the name does bring a stigma that hampers adoption at the distribution level regardless of how we feel about it so we just keep on having these circular discussions.

[waxhead]

Whatever happened to btrfs hot relocation? IBM posted patches and that was it...

I don't quite get why reiserfs even bother with that. I was under the impression that hot data tracking was supposed to be a general feature under the VFS layer.

[Slartifartblast]

Same could be said to the developers keeping the FS named after a murderer don’t you think

How many people have been blown up with dynamite but we still have the Nobel peace prize ?

Besides I'm not a fan of rubbing out history, history is what it is and cannot be changed no matter how many people stick their fingers in their ears and go lalalala pretending it never happened.

[scottishduck]

If you're going to make stupid, insensitive jokes, at least get some original material..

Same could be said to the developers keeping the FS named after a murderer don’t you think

[ferry]

Whatever happened to btrfs hot relocation? IBM posted patches and that was it...