# reiser4 in 2.6.15?

## wetter

Hi there, 

i just found this in the changelog for Linux v2.6.15-rc1

 *Quote:*   

> 
> 
> Author: Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>
> 
> Date:   Mon Nov 7 00:59:29 2005 -0800
> ...

 

does this mean that reiser4 is going to go vanilla with 2.6.15? i didn't see any big fuss on kerneltraffic or elsewhere. hmm.

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## 1U

Wow! So it's finally making it's way into the vanilla sources? It's about time. I hope this isn't some kind of a mixup. Now I won't have to make custom LiveCDs and use unstable sources to get the advantages of this great file system. Can anyone else confirm if this is actually going to happen?

This will unleash a lot of flaming from all the neophobic developers (lovechild and most of the devs here for example).Last edited by 1U on Thu Nov 17, 2005 5:59 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## Voltago

 *1U wrote:*   

> Wow! So it's finally making it's way into the vanilla sources?

 

No. Read the whole thing:

```
commit a43313668f62a06e14c915b8c8994fc8a1257394

Author: Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>

Date:   Mon Nov 7 00:59:29 2005 -0800

    [PATCH] reiser4: add radix_tree_lookup_slot()

    

    Reiser4 uses radix trees to solve a trouble reiser4_readdir has serving nfs

    requests.

    

    Unfortunately, radix tree api lacks an operation suitable for modifying

    existing entry.  This patch adds radix_tree_lookup_slot which returns pointer

    to found item within the tree.  That location can be then updated.

    

    Both Nick and Christoph Lameter have patches which need this as well.

    

    Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>

    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

```

It is at best a preparation for reiser4, not the thing itself.

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## 1U

Well that sucks, it should have been added a long time ago. At this pace, Microsoft will support reiser4 sooner than the high wizard neophobic developers which make these decisions.

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## Voltago

What's the problem of patching your kernel if you want reiser4?

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## 1U

What's the problem of simply including it in kernels? If people want to use it or not that's their choice to make, not the developers. The problem is they are creating inconveniences for everyone who wants to use it based on their own opinions and hatred of new things. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (ignorant neophobics).

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## Conan

Yea... neophobic... that's it!

More like sane.

ricer4 (note the misspelling) has had more problems with it in the beginning of it's inception than any other file system ever.  This creates a bias.

Hans reiser (note the no misspelling) has fought kernel coding standards forever or so.  This is why it has taken so long to get included, he has to keep rewriting things to make the kernel guru's happy.  Blame him, not the " cainotophobic developers" (see! I can use dictionary.com also)

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## amne

So, you called the kernel and Gentoo devs neophobics 3 times. Any other reason to include reiser4 in the kernel?

 *1U wrote:*   

> The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (ignorant neophobics).

 

Maybe the many need a stable and reliable file system that will surely be maintained by someone. The current situation doesn't seem to guarantee that the kernel devs seem to be willing/able maintain the current version of reiser 4. Hans Reiser otoh doesn't seem to maintain reiser3 any more but the kernel devs. Scary enough to me to switch to ext3 on future file systems even though i always was happy with reiser3.

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## 1U

Doesn't Hans Reiser maintain Reiser4? I don't see any real maintenance work that has to be done by the kernel developers. Look at the nitro-sources patchset, just simply include the Reiser4 patches in the regular kernel and that's all there's to it.

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## curtis119

 *1U wrote:*   

> What's the problem of simply including it in kernels? If people want to use it or not that's their choice to make, not the developers. The problem is they are creating inconveniences for everyone who wants to use it based on their own opinions and hatred of new things. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (ignorant neophobics).

 

This is why it is possible to patch your kernel in the first place. So that you DO have a choice. The kernel devs could just as easily make it impossible (or really really difficult) to apply third party patches if they so desired but they don't. They don't inlude it in the kernel proper yet because to many people are still reporting errors with it. Besides, Linus and the kernel crew are working with Hans Reiser as we speak to clean it up and get it included. If you search the LKML you will find a whole list of things they have given to Hans to fix so that he can get his code included.

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## j-m

 *1U wrote:*   

> What's the problem of simply including it in kernels? If people want to use it or not that's their choice to make, not the developers. The problem is they are creating inconveniences for everyone who wants to use it based on their own opinions and hatred of new things. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (ignorant neophobics).

 

The needs of a couple of ricers don't make up for the support nightmare for the devs. Go patch the kernel yourself and don't file bugs when things break.  :Idea: 

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## 1U

Who says the devs are forced to support every feature in the kernel? If they don't want to they don't have to support other's code, such as Reiser4. I don't understand why there's this strict "If we include it we'll HAVE to help EVERY person who uses it and we're goign to have a nightmare!! The gentoo project and kernel will die all because of the insane support from this one little feature... ohh nooo" attitude towards experimental software.

Fyi, I don't file bugs when things break so don't accuse me of doing so. There is nothing "ricer" about wanting good performance out of your system. If performance was ricing, then all Linux users are just ricers. Let's all go back to Windows XP and enjoy the "efficiency" of it's design. And don't start with the instability problems either, I've never had any Reiser4 problems. It works as stable as any other fs I've tried in Linux while being much faster.Last edited by 1U on Thu Nov 17, 2005 10:17 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## spb

 *1U wrote:*   

> Look at the nitro-sources patchset, just simply include the Reiser4 patches in the regular kernel and that's all there's to it.

 No it's not. Someone has to take care of forward-porting all the in-kernel filesystem drivers when the (internal) filesystem API changes. That's a non-trivial workload, and every filesystem added without a good reason only increases it. Not to mention the amount of trouble that reiser4 caused the external patchset maintainers last time it changed -- IIRC they were without it for several months because noone could port the thing. It's not worth holding up new kernel releases for such a thing.

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## lbrtuk

 *1U wrote:*   

> What's the problem of simply including it in kernels? If people want to use it or not that's their choice to make, not the developers.

 

This argument could be used to include any piece of crap in the kernel. It's Linus' tight meritocracy over such things that has made the kernel so reliable over the years. Crap just simply won't go in. No matter how hard people complain or who it is doing the complaining.

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## spb

 *1U wrote:*   

> There is nothing "ricer" about wanting good performance out of your system. 

 No, the rice factor comes from trying to get better performance, and ending up with something that's both slower and less stable. 

And yes, I've tried it. My current system with a complete hardened setup (pie/ssp, PaX, and SELinux, all of which add not insignificant overhead, especially to filesystem operations in the latter case) on exclusively ext3 filesystems is faster, more responsive, and more stable than the reiser4 non-hardened system was.

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## amne

 *1U wrote:*   

> Doesn't Hans Reiser maintain Reiser4? I don't see any real maintenance work that has to be done by the kernel developers.

 

I was talking about reiser3 and he does not really seem to actively maintain that any more.

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## Conan

At the risk of getting in trouble, you really need to learn what you are talking about.

 *1U wrote:*   

> Who says the devs are forced to support every feature in the kernel? If they don't want to they don't have to support other's code, such as Reiser4.  I don't understand why there's this strict "If we include it we'll HAVE to help EVERY person who uses it and we're goign to have a nightmare!! The gentoo project and kernel will die all because of the insane support from this one little feature... ohh nooo" attitude towards experimental software.

 

There is in implication, that if one downloads software from a company, that company is responsible for maintaining said software.  This implication holds true here.  The kernel needs to know that software added will be maintained for a while to come, and based on Hans Reiser's attitude to reiser3 (screw it!); there is good chance that when ricer5 comes out (the OMGTHISISEVENFASTERTHANBEFOREITBOOTSINLIEK3SEKONDS) Version, reiser4 will be left in the dust.  If this is to happen, the other developers need to feel comfortable enough about the features to maintain it.

 *Quote:*   

> And fyi, I don't file bugs when things break so don't accuse me of doing so.

 

<sarcastic>thanks for the help..</sarcastic>

 *Quote:*   

> There is nothing "ricer" about wanting good performance out of your system.

 

There is something "ricer" about sacrificing stability for performance.

 *Quote:*   

> If performance was ricing, then all Linux users are just ricers. Let's all go back to Windows XP and enjoy the "efficiency" of it's design.

 

Err, ya...

 *Quote:*   

> And don't start with the instability problems either, I've never had any Reiser4 problems. It works as stable as any other fs I've tried in Linux while being much faster.

 

Good for you.  Now what about all the other people who have had complaints?

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## Voltago

 *1U wrote:*   

> If people want to use it or not that's their choice to make, not the developers. The problem is they are creating inconveniences for everyone who wants to use it based on their own opinions and hatred of new things.

 

Well, there's a little more to it.

a) Reiser4 doesn't integrate with the Linux VFS layer. It needs a lot of extra care in its interaction with the rest of the kernel.

b) Hans Reiser stopped at some point to maintain reiserfs3. Other linux devs had to take over. There's concern it might happen again.

c) Mr. Reiser by all accounts isn't very cooperative at meeting the requirements for inclusion in the kernel.

d) If reiser4 is included into mainstream and stuff breaks and data is lost (like it did when reiserfs3 was included, for example), people will come whining to the kernel devs, not to namesys.com. Including not-quite-mature software could damage the kernels reputation for stability. Consider a noob. He doesn't know the next thing about the kernel, but wants to be a 1337 h4x0r and chooses use reiser4 for rootfs. Some time later: System crashes, data loss, emails lost, documents gone, everything lost. Now our noob might feel a bit annoyed if not positively pissed. But wait, there's helpful advice we could give him: It's his own fault because it was his own choice. Now how do you think our noob feels? Sometimes the clueless have to be protected from themselves.

e) The kernel devs carry a lot of responsibility nowadays and generally don't deserve to be trash-talked like this.

 *Quote:*   

> The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few

 

Who are these may? Can you show them to me?Last edited by Voltago on Thu Nov 17, 2005 10:22 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## 1U

 *lbrtuk wrote:*   

> This argument could be used to include any piece of crap in the kernel. It's Linus' tight meritocracy over such things that has made the kernel so reliable over the years. Crap just simply won't go in. No matter how hard people complain or who it is doing the complaining.

 

So you mean to say nitro-sources and others are just pieces of crap? It runs better than the regular kernel on my machine, and my friend even got his sound working in it when the stock kernel without the "pieces of crap" always had problems.Last edited by 1U on Thu Nov 17, 2005 10:26 pm; edited 2 times in total

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## 1U

I'm not sure what you people were doing with nitro-sources and reiser4, but it must have been your fault. It runs far better on my system and is very stable. Sure the releases aren't perfect and sometimes there are experimental versions, but once you get the final release it can keep running forever. I've had a nitro-sources .12 system run for 90 days and it could have kept going.

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## Conan

 *1U wrote:*   

>  *lbrtuk wrote:*   This argument could be used to include any piece of crap in the kernel. It's Linus' tight meritocracy over such things that has made the kernel so reliable over the years. Crap just simply won't go in. No matter how hard people complain or who it is doing the complaining. 
> 
> So you mean to say nitro-sources and others are just pieces of crap? It runs better than the regular kernel on my machine, and my friend even got his sound working in it when the stock kernel without the "pieces of crap" always had problems.

 

I mean to say nitro-sources are less stable then vanilla kernels, and less supported when things break (whcih they do frequently...)

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## j-m

 *1U wrote:*   

> Who says the devs are forced to support every feature in the kernel? If they don't want to they don't have to support other's code, such as Reiser4. I don't understand why there's this strict "If we include it we'll HAVE to help EVERY person who uses it and we're goign to have a nightmare!! The gentoo project and kernel will die all because of the insane support from this one little feature... ohh nooo" attitude towards experimental software.
> 
> 

 

Won't be in supported kernels until it's accepted upstream. Use an unsupported kernel that's already patched or patch it yourself. Period. 

 *1U wrote:*   

> 
> 
> And fyi, I don't file bugs when things break so don't accuse me of doing so. There is nothing "ricer" about wanting good performance out of your system. If performance was ricing, then all Linux users are just ricers. Let's all go back to Windows XP and enjoy the "efficiency" of it's design.

 

Ah sure, you definitely need a good performace on /boot (like in the example I used)... Also, it's much more important to have a "good performance" than to have data stored in a safe way, apparently.   :Razz: 

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## 1U

My data is as safe as yours, you're not the ones that use it so why keep making up false statements about how it works on MY machine? This is NOT ricing because I don't sacrifice any performance, stability, or anything. I simply get a BETTER system, not much to it.

What's wrong with Hans cutting off ReiserFS? If he wants to move onto newer projects then good for him. Things evolve, and there's no point of supporting old systems. It's not hard to update a partition. Crying about ReiserFS being left behind is like crying about having little support for 486 systems (though actually there's plenty of that useless junk still in the kernel). Nobody cares, it's junk, move on and quit wasting time/resources on maintaining useless things.

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## j-m

 *1U wrote:*   

> 
> 
> What's wrong with Hans cutting off ReiserFS? If he wants to move onto newer projects then good for him. Things evolve, and there's no point of supporting old systems. 
> 
> 

 

Sure, and dump the support burden on kernel devs instead. Excellent!   :Rolling Eyes: 

 *1U wrote:*   

> 
> 
> It's not hard to update a partition. 
> 
> 

 

Uh eh? There's no way to convert reiserfs to reiser4.

 *1U wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Crying about ReiserFS being left behind is like crying about having little support for 486 systems (though actually there's plenty of that useless junk still in the kernel). Nobody cares, it's junk, move on and quit wasting time/resources on maintaining useless things.

 

Proves the stupid ricers point, pretty much.

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## Voltago

 *1U wrote:*   

> My data is as safe as yours, you're not the ones that use it so why keep making up false statements about how it works on MY machine? This is NOT ricing because I don't sacrifice any performance, stability, or anything. I simply get a BETTER system, not much to it.

 

As long as you believe this, fine. But don't press your choice on other people. As you see, most people here object to the inclusion of reiser4 into mainstream. The needs of the many and so on...  :Wink: 

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## 1U

Updating your partition is easy. You move your data, reformat your partition, and viola. Go read a wiki.

You know why ReiserFS has to be supported by the kernel developers? Because the above can't be done by normal users since Reiser4 isn't in the mainstream kernel. If they chose to include it, not only would the product get more attention and improvements but there would be less ReiserFS users demanding support. Plus, it's a free product, since when is support required? Sure it's nice, but if they don't want to then nobody is going to sue them.

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## Conan

 *1U wrote:*   

> My data is as safe as yours, you're not the ones that use it so why keep making up false statements about how it works on MY machine? This is NOT ricing because I don't sacrifice any performance, stability, or anything. I simply get a BETTER system, not much to it.
> 
> What's wrong with Hans cutting off ReiserFS? If he wants to move onto newer projects then good for him. Things evolve, and there's no point of supporting old systems. It's not hard to update a partition. Crying about ReiserFS being left behind is like crying about having little support for 486 systems (though actually there's plenty of that useless junk still in the kernel). Nobody cares, it's junk, move on and quit wasting time/resources on maintaining useless things.

 

*shudders*

Ignorance really _is_ bliss, isn't it?

Believe it or not, many people use computers for things besides looking at porn and trolling g.o forums..

Many people need long term stablility in their servers, and "simply copying data to a new partion, switching it, and hoping everything works" is unacceptable downtime.  

People also don't have huge amounts of money to go spend on superflous hardware, I'm sure you make Intel//AMD happy though.

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## 1U

So I'm the troll but it's ok that you accuse me of doing nothing but surfing porn? It's quite obvious who's being neophobic and ignorant and who's trying to make some points. FYI 486 machines are 100% obsolete junk now. You can replace them with something 10 times faster for under 25 dollars. And I'm quite sure there's less people using 486 machines than there are Reiser4/nitro-sources users.

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## j-m

 *1U wrote:*   

> Updating your partition is easy. You move your data, reformat your partition, and viola. Go read a wiki.
> 
> 

 

Ah yeah, sure. I'll just move my 500GB LVM2 volume somewhere else (why not buy couple of disks for that occasion), reformat and voila... Excellent solution, really.  :Rolling Eyes: 

 *1U wrote:*   

> 
> 
> You know why ReiserFS has to be supported by the kernel developers? Because the above can't be done by normal users since Reiser4 isn't in the mainstream kernel. If they chose to include it, not only would the product get more attention and improvements but there would be less ReiserFS users demanding support. Plus, it's a free product, since when is support required? Sure it's nice, but if they don't want to then nobody is going to sue them.

 

Yeah, this approach really rocks. And also H. Reiser's approach in general really rocks, in fact so much that some people decided to stop wasting their time with that guy.   :Laughing: Last edited by j-m on Thu Nov 17, 2005 10:54 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## 1U

I believe 500 gigabyte hard drives are out already, and if you have a 500 gig lvm in the first place then you can probably afford one. Poor excuse. Plus we're not forcing you to use Reiser4, some people can manage to update their partitions and for that they are rewarded with the many benefits of Reiser4.

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## Halcy0n

 *1U wrote:*   

> I believe 500 gigabyte hard drives are out already, and if you have a 500 gig lvm in the first place then you can probably afford one. Poor excuse. Plus we're not forcing you to use Reiser4, some people can manage to update their partitions and for that they are rewarded with the many benefits of Reiser4.

 

Um...no?  That'd be like saying to me since I have about 1TB of space, I can go buy another TB extremely easily to offload all of my data to reformat all of my partitions.  Its not quite that easy, and I wish I had money to throw around like that.

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## codergeek42

 *1U wrote:*   

> My data is as safe as yours, you're not the ones that use it so why keep making up false statements about how it works on MY machine? 

 Because it works on your system, I'm 100% sure of the following:

* Your system is 32- or 64-bit x86

* You are not using extended attributes, including POSIX ACLs or SELinux

* You are not using it as a web server

* Your kernel image contains many large duplicated code segments.

It may work on your machine, but see what problems it faces getting into the mainstream kernel? Remember, filesystem code in the kernel is, for the most part, supposed to be easily portable to other architectures. Filesystems should not break standard VFS system call semantics either (for example, R4's file-as-directory approach broke Apache and various other server programs, last time I checked). 

Reiser 4 does not (yet?) support standard extended attributes/ (Heck, the addition of that to reiserFS v3 is a huge kludge, as it just places them all in a /.reiserfs_private directory as hidden inodes...)

 *Quote:*   

> What's wrong with Hans cutting off ReiserFS? If he wants to move onto newer projects then good for him.

 I see it as a very bad thing because he has, essentially, left v3 unfinished; and (last I've read), he doesn't accept patches to v3 anymore to fix the wholes in it. *Quote:*   

>  Things evolve, and there's no point of supporting old systems. 

 Then why does Linux still support Ext2 (which is more than 10 years old) and Ext3 (its journalled cousin), which was first released for general use circa November 2001? Oh that's right. It's because they work*. First and foremostly, they were designed with forward-compatibility in mind. They were designed to evolve as needed with no change to the on-disk format (even adding a journal did not change this format). Things like ACLs, extended attributes, SELinux support, full data journalling, execute-in-place support, etc. were all added cleanly and efficiently simply because of Ext2/Ext3's great design.  *Quote:*   

> It's not hard to update a partition. Crying about ReiserFS being left behind is like crying about having little support for 486 systems (though actually there's plenty of that useless junk still in the kernel). Nobody cares, it's junk, move on and quit wasting time/resources on maintaining useless things.

 So you're saying ReiserFSv3 is useless and ReiserFS v4 should be used? Well that requires a lot of potential downtime to backup everything, create the filesystem, and put everything back on it because the on-disk format changes are so drastic.

That's my understanding of it anyway (yes, I've briefly read through some of Ext3's code, but not that of any of the ReiserFS incarnations.)

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## j-m

 *1U wrote:*   

> I believe 500 gigabyte hard drives are out already, and if you have a 500 gig lvm in the first place then you can probably afford one. Poor excuse.

 

You've completely missed the point, first of all. There's no way to convert the filesystem to reiser4 and reformating a partition is not a solution, so skip this migration is easy crap. This whole debate is really pointless anyway, since you've decided to just rant a long time ago.

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## 1U

Well one of you finally makes a solid point, the fact that this whole thread  is quite pointless indeed. You can go back to hating new things, and I can go back to enjoying these enhancements. Perhaps one of these days change will force you to evolve and abolish your ignorant opinions.

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## Voltago

Yeah. You do that, son.

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## ticho

 *1U wrote:*   

> Well one of you finally makes a solid point, the fact that this whole thread  is quite pointless indeed. You can go back to hating new things, and I can go back to enjoying these enhancements. Perhaps one of these days change will force you to evolve and abolish your ignorant opinions.

 

Yes, that's right, let's ignore codergeek42's last post, why should you bother to reply to it? Oh, right, that's because you don't have the answers.

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## j-m

 *1U wrote:*   

> Well one of you finally makes a solid point, the fact that this whole thread  is quite pointless indeed. You can go back to hating new things, and I can go back to enjoying these enhancements.

 

Sure, go ahead and enjoy, there's noone stopping you. But that's a huge difference from forcing others to support inclusion of features known to be broken/badly designed, especially considering the arrogant and ignorant approach of Hans Reiser manifested many times so far (known reiserfs bugs unsolved for 2+ years, refusing of patches etc. etc. etc.)   :Exclamation: 

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## codergeek42

Also know that since you are using Reiser4 (as you have mentioned), any bug reports you post will likely be marked as INVALID unless you can reproduce them on a sane system, as Reiser4 is currently entirely unsupported by the Gentoo developer team (insofar as I am aware of). If something breaks, you get to the pieces, essentially...

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## 1U

Ok I'll reply to his last point if it makes you happy.

If someone doesn't have the ability to redo the partition then why should they even worry about future reiserfs 3.6 releases? If they have a system which must have 0 downtime then let it run and that's it. Besides, if the setup was planned wisely in advance then it's possible to make such changes. Redundancy is the key.

This is the same as Gentoo being superior to Fedora, except one level higher. Sure there has to be a balance, but the only reason why there's so much negativity towards this is simply because people do not like change. That and because most of you probably didn't even try it and instead just get your biased opinions from other developers who have personal reasons for hating it. If you did try it, you probably started with a negative view already and only looked for it's flaws to further convince yourself while ignoring the true benefits. There are negative aspects such as lack of support for other architectures, but far from anything you people claim.Last edited by 1U on Thu Nov 17, 2005 11:27 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## spb

 *1U wrote:*   

> If someone doesn't have the ability to redo the partition then why should they even worry about future reiserfs 3.6 releases? If they have a system which must have 0 downtime then let it run and that's it.

 There's a big difference between the amount of downtime required to boot a newer bug-fix kernel and the amount required to rearrange filesystems and copy a few terabytes of data back and forth several times.

 *Quote:*   

> Besides, if the setup was planned wisely in advance then it's possible to make such changes. Redundancy is the key.

 OK, you tell me how to switch all the filesystems on a large database server from reiser3 to reiser4 without massive downtime, and without breaking any of the applications it runs in the process.

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## 1U

I know there's a way, but I'm not willing to go that far in order to prove my argument in this thread at this time. One thing I'm certain about is that if I was the admin, I could do it. Actually, I'll post or maybe even write a wiki about this later. Because I'm going to bring online 2 1U Reiser4 servers and then I could experiment with such tasks. Keep dreaming of your brick walls and old systems, I'm up for the challenge, after all that's how I started with Gentoo.

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## spb

 *1U wrote:*   

> I know there's a way, but I'm not willing to go that far in order to prove my argument in this thread at this time.

 I'll leave everyone else to draw their own conclusions from that statement.  *Quote:*   

> Keep dreaming of your brick walls and old systems, I'm up for the challenge, after all that's how I started with Gentoo.

 s/old/working/

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## curtis119

It has NOTHING to do with fear of new things. I was actually looking forward to reiser4 but Hans' attitude and refusal to work within the years-long-tested-tried-and-true kernel developement process and the fact that he has abandoned reiser3 not to mention the fact that he refuses to accept patches from anyone outside his project PLUS the fact that he won't remove all the redundant i/o code AND the fact that he is purposefully breaking sys calls has made me change my mind. 

I had reiser3 on a /home partition for a while but now that rieser3 has been abandoned with known bugs outstanding I have wiped that partition and only use ext3 exclusively now. At least this way I know that 10 years from now my filesystems will be fully supported and backward compatible.

New ways of doing things is what GNU/Linux is all about. We constantly incorporate new and better ways all the time. But the various devs around the planet do that as a team, relying on each other to catch bugs and clean each others code. That is what FOSS is all about. Why is Hans ignoring this? He could have reiser4 cleaned up, bug tested and included in a snap if he was just willing to play nice with the other devs. But he won't. 

This has nothing to do with reiser4 from a technology point of view and everything to do with the fact that Hans Reisers' head is 100x bigger than it should be. Technology issues are easily solved, a piss poor attitude isn't.

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## 1U

If your accusations of Hans Reiser are true, then why doesn't someone split from the Reisre4 source and make these needed changes. For example the xmule developer also had issues but he did a good job, so the people who wanted changes split from that project and started Amule which is far better than xmule by now.

I've asked a few questions to Hans Reiser once on the phone, and he seemed like a nice person to talk to. I can't deny that he has attitude problems with some developers because I wasn't there, but this is after all just a one sided story so I won't support that fact either. What I will state though, is the issues between him and other developers do not stand in the way of me enjoying a great file system which WORKS without problems on my computer. It can be improved, but as far as performance it's still better than other file systems and the sacrifices are worth it.

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## curtis119

 *1U wrote:*   

> FYI 486 machines are 100% obsolete junk now. You can replace them with something 10 times faster for under 25 dollars. And I'm quite sure there's less people using 486 machines than there are Reiser4/nitro-sources users.

 

You obviously aren't from a third world country. That same $25 it cost you can be an entire years salary for someone living in say, Brazil. 

Besides, why should I upgrade a machine that is performing it's function perfectly? A 486 that is in perfect working order can still perform a whole lot of useful tasks. I have one acting as print server right now and it's rock solid. Why should I throw it out?

This is one of the number one selling points of GNU/Linux, it can run on just about anything and breaks the endless hardware upgrade cycle that proprietary companies have tried to lock us into. If I was a small business and I wanted to set up a file server on my old 486 and I looked at say, Windows. What would I discover? I would discover Bill Gates laughing in my face and demanding that I buy a brand new box. But if I looked at a Linix distro I would find a huge selection of software that will fullfill my needs and run on that old 486. 

There's an old saying in the IT industry "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". It applies to hardware and software equally.

And as I said in a previous post, no one is stopping you from using reiser4.

----------

## codergeek42

Excellent posts, Curtis.  :Smile: 

----------

## Diablo82

I was a happy Reiser V3 user, then I made up my mind and switched to Reiser4. I had to backup my whole hard drive 'cause there was no other way to upgrade to Reiser4. So i noticed it was quite fast, a fine compromise between xfs for large files and Reiser V3 for small files, so it was okay, maybe. But my system wasn't that responsive, and I couldn't realize why. In the meantime I switched to a newer machine, an Amd64 one and kept Reiser4. Sometimes my system was laggy. Then after some weeks, while reading some post on this forum I realized which was the problem: Reiser4.

I switched to a fine tuned ext3, more inodes for root partition, less inodes for home partition. My system now is fast, has a great responsivity and ext3 takes slightly less cpu than Reiser4 and it's far more supported and stable.

I don't need a filesystem which allows me to write/read things faster on my hard drive while taking so much cpu power that everything else slows down.

That's my point.

----------

## 1U

I didn't say support should be removed. I simply said that there's all this 486 support junk while a great FS like Reiser4 cannot be included. It doesn't make sense. And even in poor countries where that may be true, the majority are running fairly decent machines.

Diablo82, Reiser4 doesn't take any more cpu to read/write data than ext3 from what I've noticed. I can move as much data as any hard drive can handle without even remotely slowing down my compter. Do you use EIDE disks? If so, then you should have used hdparm to fix that simple problem instead of switching to ext3.

----------

## codergeek42

 *1U wrote:*   

> I didn't say support should be removed. I simply said that there's all this 486 support junk while a great FS like Reiser4 cannot be included. It doesn't make sense. 

 Perhaps if Hans' attitude were more conducive of coding and fixing bugs and less of keeping his ego inflated, we might have seen R4 go mainline long ago.  :Wink:  *Quote:*   

> And even in poor countries where that may be true, the majority are running fairly decent machines.

 Do now you want to remove something from Linux which forces those who aren't to upgrade their hardware, when it could cost them an entire year or more's salary perhaps (as Curtis mentioned), for a simple benefit that one can getting by simply setting the right processor in one's kernel configuration?   :Shocked:   :Question:  *confused*

----------

## Diablo82

I used Reiser4 on ide and sata drives, and I can tell you that when you're doing something cpu intensive while handling some huge file, Reiser4 really slows things down.

By the way, I also noticed that ext2/3 is even faster than Reiser3 (haven't even tried Reiser4) on old machines. Today I just tried that on an old k6-2 450 machine, and Ext3 was a fine compromise.

By the way I'm not saying that Reiser4 sucks, it just needs more time to get even better, lighter, more stable.

People who wanna try it can use a patch or just try MM-Sources. People who knows about Reiser4, knows how to patch a kernel.

----------

## curtis119

 *1U wrote:*   

> And even in poor countries where that may be true, the majority are running fairly decent machines.
> 
> 

 

HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHA

<breathe>

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

<gasp>

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

<passoutfromlackofoxygen>

Tell that to my friend Fernando who lives in Brazil. The majority of people in third world countries can hardly afford electricity much less a computer. Can someone from Brazil or any other country like that corroborate what I am saying please?

----------

## 1U

They already do that all the time. My friend's specific sound card support got removed. He tried emailing the developers and they basically told him to f-off because nobody uses it and it's just sound so who cares. Most likely the only reason those 486 features are still in there is because the developers themselves have a junky 486 print server that needs it. Linux kernel developers and others are not some heavenlike angels who are 100% ethical and care about everyone, they can be just as egoistic and rude as any other person.

Curtis,

Fairly decent machines is something other than a 486. I know people in "third world" countries too (btw that's just a dumb political term, it really doesn't mean much, go educate yourself about it) and they are just like the rest of the population, however they would laugh if you mention a 486.Last edited by 1U on Fri Nov 18, 2005 12:40 am; edited 1 time in total

----------

## codergeek42

Okay, I'm hoping you realize that F/OSS is entirely community-driven. Most of the Free/open-source software that exists today was written because someone wanted or needed that specific package/feature/enhancement/addition. 

Richard Stallman wanted a complete Free operating system that he could share with others to further enhance and share with the community. He decided to write his own. 

Linus needed a Unix-like OS that would work on his 386 as a university student, and since Unix was too expensive at the time and he did not know about BSD, he decided to write his own.

Alan Cox put early versions of Linux on the computers at his school and found many bugs in the kernel's networking layer, eventually just rewriting the whole subsystem. He wanted the computers to successfully be able to communicate with one another.

Daniel Robbins needed a distribution that he could have complete control and flexibility over, so he developed his own with ideas from other systems such as FreeBSD.

Some people at MIT needed a graphical windowing system so that they could show multiple terminals and a graphical clock all at once. the X windowing system arose from that need. Others then wanted to be able to use their spiffy new graphics accelerator cards with X, and thus arose the projects like Utah-GLX, Mesa and DRI.

Rasmus Lerdorf needed a simple scripting language that he could use to make his site dynamic, so he invented PHP and based its syntax on other languages like C and Perl.

Do you kinda see where I'm going with this?  :Smile: 

----------

## 1U

I know what this is, I don't need a history lesson about it. Don't go off topic.

----------

## codergeek42

 *1U wrote:*   

> I know what this is, I don't need a history lesson about it. Don't go off topic.

  I wasn't.   :Confused: 

You mentioned that the sound support got removed because the developers felt it was unneeded. I helped support that idea with multiple historical arguments...

----------

## 1U

I was simply pointing out that the reason Reiser4 isn't in the kernel and there are big conflicts between Hans and the rest of the developers is more personal than logical. Just like the soundcard or the 486 support. If the developers didn't need that 486 support I doubt they'd even have second thoughts about people who can barely even pay for power. My points aren't weak enough to require history lesson type help to back them up.

----------

## j-m

 *1U wrote:*   

> My points aren't weak enough to require history lesson type help to back them up.

 

No, I would not call your points weak, I'd rather call them missing... Please, read this LKML thread first, before you continue the "great new filesystem" eulogies...   :Idea: 

----------

## 1U

Thanks for the link, it looks interesting. I will read it as soon as I get the time.

----------

## codergeek42

 *j-m wrote:*   

>  *1U wrote:*   My points aren't weak enough to require history lesson type help to back them up. 
> 
> No, I would not call your points weak, I'd rather call them missing... Please, read this LKML thread first, before you continue the "great new filesystem" eulogies...  

 Thanks, j-m. I was wondering where that thread went.  :Smile: 

Edited to add the following: *Hans Reiser to the LKML wrote:*   

> Hellwig, people who write slow file systems should not lecture their
> 
> measurably superiors on how to code.  Oh, and I should mention that
> 
> other people besides me have measured reiser4, and concluded it is twice
> ...

   :Shocked:  Just when I thought his ego couldn't get any bigger! Oh dear...

----------

## 1U

"Oh dear!"   :Surprised:   Once again, this is just one sided. Go quote some of the other developer's posts too. I haven't read all of it yet, but they aren't any more polite. I can understand his reasons for that reply.

----------

## MrApples

1U,

Perhaps your time could be better spent regarding this issue.  Senselessly arguing this issue on the Gentoo forums is not going to get you anywhere, and, since this is apparently an extremely important issue for you, I would not want your time to be ill-spent.  My suggestion is that you go team up with Mr. Reiser, hire some 'college juniors' that are more skilled than Linux kernel developers, and write your own kernel.  That way, you can call the shots, Hans can inflate his ego some more, and we can be rid of you both.

----------

## Paapaa

 *1U wrote:*   

> Please, read this LKML thread first, before you continue the "great new filesystem" eulogies...  

 

Now I understand why it has been (and will be?) not so trivial task to try to include reiser4 in vanilla. Co-operation hasn't had the highest priority in the development...

I really support the view that reiser4 should NOT be included before it is mature and stable. 1U should understand that it has very little to do with anything if reiser4 works well in his setup. It should work well in ALL setups in ALL situations. Filesystem should be 100% (critical) bug free and it definitely should not cause data loss in any situation. If there are any reports of critical bugs affecting data integrity, they should be fixed before the inclusion. I don't know how far they are in this regard. And it is also true, that the final testing even can't begin before inclusion. But be patient, unless anything really bad happens, reiser4 will be included - sooner or later.

I think nobody is against better performance. The question is: at what cost? Also, remember reiser4 is not always faster than, say, ext3. And even from Namesys's own benchmarks you can see reiser4 uses more cpu time than others in many situations.

----------

## linuxtuxhellsinki

I agree, & this has been very informatic thread about Reiser4's problems (which I've also waited for & I think it's better to wait until it's ok)

----------

## xordan

I'm using reiserfs on /boot and reiser4 on all my other partitions, noticed a nice performance improvement after changing, and have been running stable for several months. I have however noticed problems with reiser4, such as data loss (only recently written data) on a hard reset for example, but that doesn't bother me as I never hard reset. Personally I think reiser4 isn't ready for inclusion in vanilla kernel, even though it works fine for me, simply because a vanilla kernel should be rock solid in all aspects, and tbh reiser4 isn't rock solid in all aspects so doesn't meet that requirement. I would like to see reiser4-gentoo-sources in portage, but I'm fairly happy with using the ebuilds maintained on the gentoo wiki. (mm-sources is too unstable for me, so I won't use that even if it is in portage.) When it's included in vanilla then I don't think anybody will have any problems with it being there, as by then it will work nicely. I generally trust what the kernel devs think, and I guess everyone should considering that they've got it this far.

----------

## lbrtuk

I'd love to see a kernel development process run by 1U.

Only one or two ethernet interfaces would work at any one time because they'd constantly be changing internal kernel structures and nobody would be able to keep up up-porting the old drivers. But that wouldn't matter because 'People should all be using the new Marvell chips and not hang on to their old chips.'. It would be x86-only because 'Why should x86 guys be held back by having to be architecture neutral?'. (Speaking of which, does reiser4 even work on non-x86 yet?). Half the drivers would work on SMP but not on uniprocessor or vice versa because 'Why should people who can use the driver be denied it being put in the kernel? No-one is forcing you to use it.'

Basically, anything going into the kernel has to meet a certain standard of portability, maintainability and abstraction (so that common code can be shared). If Linus' standards dropped, the whole thing would fall apart in the way that I have just described.

----------

## 1U

 *xordan wrote:*   

> When it's included in vanilla then I don't think anybody will have any problems with it being there, as by then it will work nicely. I generally trust what the kernel devs think, and I guess everyone should considering that they've got it this far.

 

I'm glad you like it, but incase you haven't read this entire thread it's quite obvious it will never be included in the vanilla sources. I'm sure someone dedicated to programming superior file systems should be trusted more than biased kernel developers who let in xfs but not reiser4.

lbrtuk, I'm glad you'd love to see kernel development process run by me and that you appreciate all the work Hans Reiser has done. You should become a kernel developer so you can convince them to include Reiser4, or at least a psychologist to treat the multiple mental problems of some developers.

----------

## jamesdick628

 *1U wrote:*   

> lbrtuk, I'm glad you'd love to see kernel development process run by me and that you appreciate all the work Hans Reiser has done.

 

I believe lbrtuk's post was satire...

----------

## codergeek42

 *1U wrote:*   

> I'm sure someone dedicated to programming superior file systems should be trusted more than biased kernel developers who let in xfs but not reiser4.

 The kernel developers are biased because they want filesystem code that follows published and documented guidelines. They are biased because they want the kernel to be absolutely solid. They are biased because they want code that doesn't duplicate what's already elsewhere in the kernel. They are biased because they want what's best for all users, which is stability and performance. Reiser4 isn't great with either of these two, or so I've read.

----------

## 1U

Xfs doesn't meet "published and documented guidelines" as stated in that long thread linked previously in this thread. And "Or so I've read" doesn't qualify as a statement to backup your opinions.

Here's an example identical to Reiser4 but outside of the computer field. Using acetone as a gasoline additive will supposedly kill my engine and eat away all my fuel line components "Or so I've read", but I go based on actual results and I get information from people who know what they are doing, not biased sources (mushroom farmers... see below) who hate change and envy other's improvements. Therefore I enjoy more performance and efficiency from my vehicle than those who don't, AND it does not create any potentital risks such as "instability" or "incompatibility" that some WHO NEVER USED IT claim.

Neophobic geeks, that's all there's to it. It works great on my computer and on many others. Who cares what people on other architectures can and cannot use, Reiser4 is not the only fs out there so they can still use Linux. You people are like mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed shit. Just like society has it's identical hollow masses who think alike and have dull conventional routines, so does the open source movement.

----------

## Paapaa

 *1U wrote:*   

> Reiser4 is not the only fs out there so they can still use Linux.

 

That pretty much sums it up  :Smile: 

----------

## codergeek42

1U, please behave yourself. Personal insults (such as calling people "hollow masses," who "are kept in the dark and fed [crap]") is rude and uncalled for. Discussion and argument is good and healthy; but if we can't keep it mature, then I'll have to lock the thread before it becomes a major flamewar. Thanks.

----------

## MrApples

 *1U wrote:*   

> You people are like mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed shit. Just like society has it's identical hollow masses who think alike and have dull conventional routines, so does the open source movement.

 Then please, by all means, go some where else.

----------

## spb

 *1U wrote:*   

> Xfs doesn't meet "published and documented guidelines" as stated in that long thread linked previously in this thread. And "Or so I've read" doesn't qualify as a statement to backup your opinions.

 Have you never heard of POSIX file semantics? XFS follows them quite nicely. Reiser4 decidedly doesn't. Oh, and XFS uses the kernel's VFS layer and so (a) reuses existing code to do tasks common to all filesystems and (b) behaves the way everyone expects it to. Reiser4 doesn't, and therefore duplicates masses of code unnecessarily and behaves in some weird manner that breaks applications relying on standard filesystem semantics.

In a nutshell, the whole thing is broken by design, quite apart from being shoddily coded (arch-broken code) and its main proponent having the social skills of a deranged banana.

----------

## Voltago

 *1U wrote:*   

> And "Or so I've read" doesn't qualify as a statement to backup your opinions.

 

Arrogance and abuse doesn't back up yours, it rather disqualifies them. And if you're so keen on getting reiser4 into mainstream, why not submit a few patches to make it VFS and POSIX compliant? So much more productive than bickering and calling people names.

----------

## firephoto

So there's been a few positive comments about reiser4 but mostly the same old negatives. The lkml link posted above sums up both sides attitudes pretty good and the last reply (which has not been responded too) gives the update on the requested changes which have been completed. It also should be noted that some of the well supported and praised filesystems in the kernel (and mentioned in this topic) are filesystems that were developed by some of the current core kernel development team who also are responsible for making the decision if reiser4 gets into the kernel. I understand that people can be unbiased in situations like this but there are also people that absolutely cannot. It would be similar to someone with a Chevy dealership asking to be allowed to park and sell his brand new cars on the Ford dealership lot.  :Wink:  Free and open is great but that doesn't eliminate the egos and competition even if there may or may not be financial benefit to what technology gets chosen. I have a feeling that opposing sides would like their filesystem chosen as "better" or as the "default" and do whatever necessary to keep it that way.

My experience with reiser4 has been good with a known working patch and kernel version there's been no problems. Now normally one wouldn't have to say more when something "works" but apparently being in the majority as far a "pc users" go isn't typically good enough. What's that mean? That means my tests involved having a filesystem that was reiser4 on a computer that I do email, web, listen to music, watch movies, instant message, manage my digital photos, manage web pages, video editing, and other things all typical of the majority of users out there. Did I have lots of partitions managed with lvm? no. Was I concerned with inodes, posix, hardened, or other related things? no. Did I have multiple gigabytes of source code for projects I'm working on? no. I could go on but there's no point. If you need those things then you know what works best for those situations and your needs but for most people they don't care. Something I care about though is the fact that I can build a system with reiser4 (on amd64) and not have any filesystem issues with it but others can do the same but have all sorts of issues with it and reiser4 gets the finger pointed at as the problem. I will admit that I was selective on choosing reiser4 patches but that only makes sense if you want to use something and not be fixing something. Now I don't use that installation anymore since my x86 install is much faster and the changes to reiser4 at the time made current kernel patches non-existent but I did built a fresh kernel with the 2.6.14-archck patch set the other day so I could grab some files off the reiser4 partition and I did so with no issue after the reiser4 partition hadn't been accessed for 3 months since I had a 2.6.11 kernel with reiser4 support.

It will get into vanilla eventually but it's too late for 2.6.15 now.

----------

## 1U

That's a good post firephoto, a very nice summary of the entire situation.

Here's what Hans Reiser has to say about ReiserFS btw:

 *Quote:*   

> cut off?  Never cut it off, but I did obsolete it.

 

It's time to get with the program and upgrade instead of clinging to old file systems and complaining.

----------

## codergeek42

Wow. Obsoleting an incomplete FS before the next version even functions properly! Wonderful job, Hans!   :Laughing:   :Rolling Eyes: 

----------

## 1U

 *codergeek42 wrote:*   

> next version even functions properly

 

It functions properly. If it didn't, I wouldn't be replying here. There's a difference between functioning properly and satisfying the ego of high wizard liberal super duper developer geeks. Unfortunately Hans Reiser can't do the second, but he's done a great job at making it function properly which is what counts.

----------

## PrakashP

My experience with Reiser 4 (some month ago):

- On my 2.2GHz Athlon-XP Machine it is slower than reiserfs and xfs - and getting slower faster. (Even Hand Reiser admitted it needs a repacker - check LKML)

- Considering data integrity on hard locks, Reiser 4 is so far the best fs I tested - only minimal data losses. xfs on the other hand tends to loose files which are opened even read-only...

----------

## UberPinguin

I just finished building a GCC-4.0.2/glibc-2.3.6-r1/NITRO-nptl P4-2.66GHz system with reiser4 for / and /home and ext3 for /boot.  I've used hdparm to optimize my disk.  I thought it'd be pretty fast, right?  Well...it's faster than the SuSE 9.3 it replaced, but not nearly what was expected.  And writing simple text files (xorg.conf and other, much smaller configs) takes multiple seconds. 3 seconds to write a file consisting entirely of :

1

2

3

4

The same file on my ext3 partition writes before my finger leaves the 'enter' key.  So as far as reiser4 being sooo much faster.... not for me, anyway.  I'll be backing up and re-formatting with ext3 as soon as I have the spare time to take my machine down.  And I don't know if it's related to reiser4, but for some reason files aren't reporting the correct modification time at boot (I get LOTS of 'some file in {init.d/conf.d} has modification time in the future' even though they don't).

----------

## gimpel

 *UberPinguin wrote:*   

> I just finished building a GCC-4.0.2/glibc-2.3.6-r1/NITRO-nptl P4-2.66GHz system with reiser4 for / and /home and ext3 for /boot.  ...

 

reiser4 in 2.6.14 (i just guess that your nitro is a 2.6.14 one) has heavy fsync problems, which causes vi (i assume you use that..) to take a long while on :wq!

mounting it noatime,nodiratime helps... read the mailing list

----------

## GentooBox

 *codergeek42 wrote:*   

> Wow. Obsoleting an incomplete FS before the next version even functions properly! Wonderful job, Hans!   

 

How is ReiserFS incomplete?

1U -> You really need to get a job in a big IT company and see how well it goes when you switch to a new technology. Its not nice, i can tell you that much.

If the kernel devs trow out all "crap code" all the current systems will be broken and they would have to spend lots of billions on new systems, just because someone wanted to get rid off all the old features.

If you want, you could fork a new kernel tree and call it 1U-speedykernel, I would love to test/use it on my home system. But at my work i would not use it before 1. it was proven stable, 2. Is has backwards support for all the current technologies. 3. I could count on the kernel to stay stable and not include any code that would have a risk of breaking my systems.

And then where are we at ? back to start, where the linux kernel is.

I've tryed the Reiser4 code some months ago, it was stable until someone turned off the system when it was running. - some files got killed... not a big deal for me because i dident have anything but gentoo on that partition.

I reinstalled with Reiser4 again and found out at my first boot that grub dident include a reiser4 patch so i couldent boot my new system.

Then I installed mandriva because i got tired of waiting 12 hours on compiling my new system.

----------

## calr0x

By page 2 I couldn't take the annoying tone of almost everybody and stopped, posted this, and read something else..

----------

## UberPinguin

 *gimpel wrote:*   

> reiser4 in 2.6.14 (i just guess that your nitro is a 2.6.14 one) has heavy fsync problems, which causes vi (i assume you use that..) to take a long while on :wq!
> 
> mounting it noatime,nodiratime helps... read the mailing list

 

I tried it out with a couple of loop devices.  I was already using noatime, but adding nodiratime did improve write speed.  However, I get roughly similar performance on my system (I haven't run any heavy benchmarks) with ext3 mounted with 'sync,data=journal'; AND I get better data integrity, especially when my 2-year-old decides to hit the power switch  :Wink: .

reiser4 may work very well for some situations, but it is far from being a universally superior filesystem.

----------

## 1U

I'm running on .12 and Reiser4 and it's faster than ever. Just remember that for every person who complains there's usually 50 who are happy but don't bother praising things since there's no point. It may  not be as rock solid as far as support of architectures and strange setups as other file systems, but it's way faster. There has to be a balance, the speed is a tradeoff for not being able to use it on systems nobody cares about which can be replaced or some unlky people. I use it on 5 different systems all the way from pentium2 to opteron, and I never have problems.

----------

## spb

 *1U wrote:*   

> There has to be a balance, the speed is a tradeoff for not being able to use it on systems nobody cares about which can be replaced or some unlky people.

 So Sparc, Power, and Itanium are systems noone cares about?

----------

## UberPinguin

I was an early adopter of the reiser3 system.  The really exciting features of reiserfs were journalling and decent performace (I saw reiserfs options in the kernel long before I saw ext3).  However, even using 3.5 and 3.6, I saw data loss and corruption; and that was while the system was still running, without a crash or hard-reset.

For those who aren't entirely familiar with filesystem terminology: Journalled filesystems are intended to provide security for your data.  The data is written to the journal before/when/after (depending on your mount flags) it is written to the disk; the idea behind this is that if the machine crashes before the disk buffer is synced (Linux tends to use asynchronous mounts; better performance at a slightly greater risk to your data), the transactions can be replayed on the next boot, preserving your data.  All of this tends to lead to slower disk i/o, hence the excitement over reiserfs' promised performance enhancements: data security AND a performance boost!

Until it is properly coded and implemented, reiser4 will continue to break its own fundamental concepts.  

When choosing a filesystem for data security, it is generally inadvisable to choose one that has known bugs that actually increase the risk of data loss; this is especially true when the system can lose data in the specific situations it is supposed to protect against (i.e. system crash or sudden shutdown without fsync and umount).  

Regardless of whether you, personally, have experienced data loss, it is an unacceptable risk for anyone who actually needs the safety of a journalled filesystem.  Add onto that the fact that the mount options must be tweaked beyond safe, default settings to obtain any performance increase whatsoever (in fact, otherwise you actually have worse performance) and reiser4 loses any shred of feasibility in a production environment.  

Users who feel driven to use reiser4 are probably knowledgeable or determined enough to use a non-vanilla kernel to get the experimental features they are looking for.  Good for us.  Adding such a dangerous and immature filesystem to the main kernel tree would be, well, immature and ignorant.  Linux runs on myriad different hardware and software configurations and must do so reliably, so having reiser4 'work for you (tm)' on 5 x86-based machines is not exactly proof that the filesystem is mature enough for inclusion.  At least until Hans Reiser decides to write a filesystem that performs as advertised and is compatible with the architectures on which Linux is supported.  Until then, calling people who spend hundreds of hours of their personal time, for free, to bring you a Pretty Damn Good (tm) operating system 'ignorant and neophobic' is just stupid.  Grow up.

----------

## lbrtuk

I'm quite sure 1U is just here to troll and provoke. Especially since he changed his location to some white power bullshit.

So I really wouldn't bother arguing this one.

----------

## UberPinguin

lbrtuk: Yeah; I have to admit that using a portrait of a Nazi officer for your avatar isn't exactly the sign of an enlightened mind  :Wink: 

----------

## sirdilznik

I'm not here to fuel the flames, but I do have to say I've been running reiser4 for nearly a year on amd64 (on which it is supposedly broken).  I have to say this "broken" system has been rock solid and quite fast throughout.  I'll also give reiser4 a pat on the back for getting through several power outages at my old place with zero data loss/corruption.  However I read about people having problems and I believe there may be problems.  The risk I take is my own running this "unstable" file system.  When I got my amd64 machine I decided to try out new things.  Reiser4 was one of them, with the thought that if it borked, no prob. I'll recompile into something more "stable".  (All my important stuff is backed up to cds anyhow).  Only reiser4 never borked.  Maybe I'm just lucky and my particular hardware/software plays nice with reiser4, but I'm lovin' it (not McDonald's  :Wink:  ), and at this point I would not trust my data to another file system.

However I'm not going to get upset about it not being included in the mainline kernel yet.  I'm sure the higher powers have their reasons and would rather have them crank out solid kernels rather than rush features.  Besides there are plenty of quality patchsets with reiser4 support, and patching the vanilla kernel isn't that hard.  Even when reiser4 does go mainline I may not switch anyway, I'm liking my current patchset very much   :Cool: 

----------

## mpalencia

I´ve used Reiser4 on a couple of systems, and the performance was always about average compared to xfs or ext3 in diferent situations.

For example: Small Files Reiser4 was the fastest Always, but the overall "feel" of the desktop was slower compared to ext3 (dir index and journal) Please note that I´m not talking about Stable or not, just performance.

Xfs is the fastest in response, and with big files, also programs started up way faster in XFS, but it was very slow with small files (portage).

In stability, Reiser4 since 2.6.13 and reiser4 ver 1.0.5 has become very unstable, I understand this is from the kernel implementation because of several changes being made, aside from that, it endured a couple of hard locks (bad memory modules) with no data loss, but as I said after 2.6.13, it isnt as stable as with .12 with .13 the system would lock on boot, and this became a known bug that was later resolved but came back on .14

And also, the worst thing about REiser4 is the CPU usage, on that level it´s unusable for video encoding and really slows compilations because it needs much more CPU for everything. 

About ext3, everybody knows that is really really stable and fast, the best all-around I use it on /

XFS I use it for my raid array where I do video capturing/ediing/encoding and works perfectly.

Reiser4 still is VERY young, and needs at least a couple of years of work, and maybe it should be included in the kernel after all the problems with VFS are solved, but with an EXPERIMENTAL tag as it its still a bit dangerous.

athlon64 3200 

1g DDR 400 Kingston

2 X Maxtor Diamond MAX plus 10 200GB SATA

MSI K8N neo3

OS: Gentoo   :Very Happy:  , PCBSD   :Twisted Evil: 

----------

## epic

one thing though, i got really surprised as i read gentoo devs and forum mods stating

that ReiserFS was "left-behind"/unmaintained, this is _wholly_ untrue, and you should know this

and certainly not made statements about it if your not sure about what you are saying(!) :P

ReiserFS is maintained with bugfixes and patches by some SuSe-team(or is it novell theese days?),

you would have known this if you had done 1 google or so.

Suse does this, because they try to support an enterprise grade distro that uses ReiserFS as the main FS.

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## martin.k

Some people seem to forget what happend with reiserfs... Better track the story on lkml than fire up flame wars...

If you don't follow the linux codding style you will not get merged into mainline kernel and Hansi is not willing to follow that style and he is/was sometimes rude.

So for now patching with -mm or -namesys patches is the solution for reiser4 fans.

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## firephoto

Except if you followed the reiser4 development you'd know that they did all this already (coding style changes + other things) and are just re-stabilizing theses changes.

Development in linux isn't slow so what was happening or relevant 6 months or a year ago most likely isn't relevant now if it was just an "argument" at the time.

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## playfool

 *j-m wrote:*   

>  *1U wrote:*   What's the problem of simply including it in kernels? If people want to use it or not that's their choice to make, not the developers. The problem is they are creating inconveniences for everyone who wants to use it based on their own opinions and hatred of new things. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (ignorant neophobics). 
> 
> The needs of a couple of ricers don't make up for the support nightmare for the devs. Go patch the kernel yourself and don't file bugs when things break. 

 

Let's see, developer decides to add support for previously unsupported filesystem, regardless of the state of support in the distro. Then following breakage on systems related to the patch, he pulls support.. and this is somehow the users fault??

This is I've ever seen it, is developer judgement error - once you add support, it has to stay or you break setups, that is why it is advantatious to wait till such support is done upstream.. But from there to blame the users.. that's low.

As for the status of Reiser4 in general, I haven't seen any indications that it is set of inclusion any time soon and for good reason. All good things to those who wait, and honestly the latency issues with Reiser4 I experienced does not exactly make it an attractive filesystem for a desktop setup in my mind so I fail to see why people are so nuts about it.

----------

## clintar

If those posted bug reports seem like a "support nightmare" to you, then maybe being a developer is way too much for you.

----------

## dsd

 *epic wrote:*   

> one thing though, i got really surprised as i read gentoo devs and forum mods stating
> 
> that ReiserFS was "left-behind"/unmaintained, this is _wholly_ untrue, and you should know this
> 
> and certainly not made statements about it if your not sure about what you are saying(!) 

 

i've had trouble getting anyone to look at reiser3 bugs reported by gentoo users in the past, nobody is interested. fortunately there havent been any serious bugs reported for a while, so i cant comment on the current situation.

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## nmbrthry

 *epic wrote:*   

> one thing though, i got really surprised as i read gentoo devs and forum mods stating
> 
> that ReiserFS was "left-behind"/unmaintained, this is _wholly_ untrue, and you should know this
> 
> and certainly not made statements about it if your not sure about what you are saying(!) 
> ...

 

It's not that it isn't supported, but rather namesys and Reiser aren't supporting it. This leaves it in the hands of the kernel developers to maintain. This explains their insistence on coding standards, since they want to be able to read the code if they might be the ones supporting Reiser4 in the future (when ReiserXP comes out or whatever he calls the next one...).

----------

## at240

 *nmbrthry wrote:*   

>  (when ReiserXP comes out or whatever he calls the next one...).

 

[off topic] 

ReiserVista   :Razz: 

[/off topic]

----------

## Matteo Azzali

 *1U wrote:*   

> They already do that all the time. My friend's specific sound card support got removed. He tried emailing the developers and they basically told him to f-off because nobody uses it and it's just sound so who cares. Most likely the only reason those 486 features are still in there is because the developers themselves have a junky 486 print server that needs it. Linux kernel developers and others are not some heavenlike angels who are 100% ethical and care about everyone, they can be just as egoistic and rude as any other person.
> 
> Curtis,
> 
> Fairly decent machines is something other than a 486. I know people in "third world" countries too (btw that's just a dumb political term, it really doesn't mean much, go educate yourself about it) and they are just like the rest of the population, however they would laugh if you mention a 486.

 

Imho is not tha opinion of "fairly decent" but the "time to broke" that will determine the time to cut off 486 stuffs. 486 are no more sold by about 11 years,

and at least in 5-6 years will be fair to suppose that even the last one is broken...

----------

## codergeek42

 *Matteo Azzali wrote:*   

> Imho is not tha opinion of "fairly decent" but the "time to broke" that will determine the time to cut off 486 stuffs. 486 are no more sold by about 11 years,
> 
> and at least in 5-6 years will be fair to suppose that even the last one is broken...

 For consumer PCs and whatnot yes, but what about for Embedded stuff that requires minimal computing power?

----------

## Matteo Azzali

 *dsd wrote:*   

>  *epic wrote:*   one thing though, i got really surprised as i read gentoo devs and forum mods stating
> 
> that ReiserFS was "left-behind"/unmaintained, this is _wholly_ untrue, and you should know this
> 
> and certainly not made statements about it if your not sure about what you are saying(!)  
> ...

 

Till now I found a lots of bug here and there, and reported. I'm used to stress any software just as it enters my machine. Still in a ~x86 environment

(since 2 months with kernel compiled for AMD64 machines, but my new processor is a sempron 64 revision E) I could not find any bug 

(still have to try for files larger than 4 Gb) other than the resize/move issue (don't resize/move reiserfs partitions whitout a backup of everything).

Just my 2 cents, but we should do a poll: "are you using reiserFS or reiser4?" . Someone could be surprised by the results....

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## Matteo Azzali

 *codergeek42 wrote:*   

>  *Matteo Azzali wrote:*   Imho is not tha opinion of "fairly decent" but the "time to broke" that will determine the time to cut off 486 stuffs. 486 are no more sold by about 11 years,
> 
> and at least in 5-6 years will be fair to suppose that even the last one is broken... For consumer PCs and whatnot yes, but what about for Embedded stuff that requires minimal computing power?

 

Are these 486-based embedded stuffs on sale?  If are you talking of industry hardware, is that running linux?

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## codergeek42

Good points. I'm not really sure of embedded things, actually.  :Neutral: 

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## Matteo Azzali

 *codergeek42 wrote:*   

> Good points. I'm not really sure of embedded things, actually. 

 

Nothing bad, I just asked cause in my Industry Electronics exam (a pairs of years ago) we studied

just microcontrollers machines and not microcomputer ones (they said this was cause of the exactly

predictable timings of ASM instructions in microcontrollers.....but in facts our exercise boards were using

the old commodore transformers...)

----------

## petrjanda

Sun's ZFS should be ported to Linux and ditch ricer4 altogether.

----------

## Matteo Azzali

 Should?  Is that allowed,a started project or what? Couldn't find anything googling,

just references to Solaris....

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## DarkFoon

@petrjanda

I would disagree with the last part. 

I believe that Reiser4 has potential to become something really interesting. 

I am pleased with reiser3 (ReiserFS) and I look forward to when Reiser4 is as stable as reiser3.

A short story:

When I first came to the land of the penguin, from the land of broken shards of glass, I knew nothing, and was cocky.

I broke my install in 1 reboot. How? I used ext3, and I managed to freeze my desktop (I used redhat 9, I think)

Because I knew that CTRL+ALT+DEL wouldn't work, and I didn't know of anything else to do, I hit the little reset button.

On the reboot, I found that most of my filesystem was damaged and I couldn't even reach a prompt.

Once I learned more(and got a different distro), I tried this "ReiserFS". I again managed to freeze my computer at some point, and with great hesitation, I pressed the reset button. On reboot everything came back just fine. I was shocked. 

I got curious, and I decided to delibrately try to break my install. (this computer wasn't all that important) So, I pressed the reset button at random times; during disk writes, idle time, boot. Each and everytime it was fine. 

Because of my experiences, I assume (perhaps foolishly; time will tell) that reiser4, when it is mature, will be as amazing to me as ReiserFS was then. 

But I disagree with 1U as well. The kernel maintainers aren't "neophobic". Reiser4 isn't mature, and they know it. Thanks to people like himself, the patches are used, and reiser4 gets some testing done. Once it is mature, and stable, and enough people have used it and proved it is stable, then it will be included in the kernel, and I look forward to that day. 

This ZFS you are talking about will have to go through the same thing (once it is ported).

----------

## sirdilznik

 *DarkFoon wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Once I learned more(and got a different distro), I tried this "ReiserFS". I again managed to freeze my computer at some point, and with great hesitation, I pressed the reset button. On reboot everything came back just fine. I was shocked. 
> 
> I got curious, and I decided to delibrately try to break my install. (this computer wasn't all that important) So, I pressed the reset button at random times; during disk writes, idle time, boot. Each and everytime it was fine. 
> ...

 

Reiser4 writes data to the disk "atomically".  It either writes the file completely, or not at all.  If I understand correctly, this means that data loss/corruption due to power outages/lock-ups is impossible in reiser4.  My own experiances support this theory   :Laughing: 

----------

## plasmagunman

 *1U wrote:*   

> My data is as safe as yours, you're not the ones that use it so why keep making up false statements about how it works on MY machine? This is NOT ricing because I don't sacrifice any performance, stability, or anything. I simply get a BETTER system, not much to it.

 

i don't see anyone making statements about how reiser4 works on YOUR machine, actually 5.999.999.999 people on this world don't give anything on your machine. torvalds tries to provide a kernel, which works best on MOST systems. that means: if there are 10 people saying "it works" and ten saying "it doesn't", better wait until the issues are solved. that way you get a stable kernel for "normal" people. for the "bleeding edge"-customer there are mm-sources with all nifty new features, to be used at your own risk. you do have the choice.

 *Quote:*   

> What's wrong with Hans cutting off ReiserFS? If he wants to move onto newer projects then good for him. Things evolve, and there's no point of supporting old systems. It's not hard to update a partition.

 

actually he dropped maintaining reiserfs long before reiser4 got released, so he let us for some months without any filesystem. he did never say: "don't fix that in reiserfs, better upgrade to reiser4", he said: "don't fix that in reiserfs, better wait some months for reiser4".

in the end the stability of reiser4 is not really part of the discussion, there are other reasons it doesn't get included in vanilla. check the most recent discussion (at least it's the most recent i know...). imho it's hans reiser's own fault, and i would like to say: many people are waiting for reiser4 (me too) and hans reiser should do his work and prepare his patch for the vanilla kernel. he said, kernel-inclusion is top-priority, but it really doesn't look like he is very interested in that.

off topic: is "Location: where whites aren't the minority yet" meant to be funny?

EDIT: this post seems quite missplaced, actually i just recently realized that this thread is 5 pages long, i just had read and answered to the first page   :Embarassed:   anyway: happy hanukkah!

----------

## Gentree

[WARNING]

Just a warning for those using or thinking of using R4 on recent (>=2.6.12 kernels) 

The current R4 (1.0.5) is a patch for mm kernels where the effort is to include it eventually.

It includes some changes (additional plugins) that make it INCOMPATIBLE with earlier partitions based on 1.0.4

SIMPLY mounting the partition seems to modify it.

Once an older partition is mounted with a 1.0.5 capable kernel it will no longer mount with and earlier kernel: ie your previous stable kernel and many R4 aware live CDs for example.

There is a way back but it's a bit of hassle https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=3019057

Basically you need to make a choice between <2.6.12 with 1.0.4 or the later kernels and stick with one or the other.

Knowing this in advance helps in making the right choice and taking suitable precautions.

Backwards compatability has never been high on the R4 feature list but this should have been clearly signalled.

Maybe this is one area where improvement could be enforced as a condition of kernel inclusion.

[/WARNING]

I agree with earlier posts , the atomic write is the key feature for me.

I got in a mess recently when a careless error filled my root partition with several linux ISO images. The result was that the system could not even handle 'ls' with crapping itself. I had to hit the reset button. Thanks to atomic writes I was able to boot to a CD delete one file and I was back in business without any corruption.

I have been in power-off situations with ext3 in the past that have ended a lot less joyfully.

I'm not saying ext3 is crap because of that, it's a case of tools for the job. I've never had to waste day untangling the mess after a change in the kernel support for ext3 either. That's why there's a delay in getting R4 into the kernel and why it will be great once it gets accepted. This sort of thing will not happen.

It seems that Herr Raiser has created a very impressive fs with minimal outside help. If kernel inclusion can oblige some more stability and the addition of some other minds with a wider outlook I think this will become a major force in Linux in the not too distant future.

I continue to use R4 on several partitions, as always with due care and attention.

 :Cool: 

----------

## joey_knisch

My 2 cents...

cent 1:

Reiser4 does need to settle down before getting vanilla.  However someone should make a simple reiser4kernel ebuild and get it in portage for those that demand that sort of thing.  That would most likely shut everybody up (no offense).

cent2:

EXT3 fanboys need to stop posting whenever reiser4 is brought up.  Nobody should care that much about a stupid fs.  I guarantee I can screw up any fs including your precious ext3.  The trick is hard resets during a large group of writes to multiple files.  You will mess up data no matter what fs you are using.  Same goes for XFS, JFS...

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## sirdilznik

 *joey_knisch wrote:*   

> My 2 cents...
> 
> cent 1:
> 
> Reiser4 does need to settle down before getting vanilla.  However someone should make a simple reiser4kernel ebuild and get it in portage for those that demand that sort of thing.  That would most likely shut everybody up (no offense).
> ...

 

cent1:  ebuilds for reiser4kernels exist and have existed for a long time(mm,nitro, archck, etc...).  MM is in portage and the others just need to be put in an overlay. 

cent2: I've had power-outages and hard-locks during all types of heavy multiple file-writes.  Never lost/corrupted a single piece of data with R4.  I agree ext3 fanboys need to stop bashing.  I can (and have) broken ext3.

----------

## Gentree

 *Quote:*   

> cent2: 
> 
> EXT3 fanboys need to stop posting whenever reiser4 is brought up.

 

well I agree in principal but let's not be provocative   :Wink: 

everyone has their favourites whether it be FS, NS, OS or GODESS.

What is interesting is the way we get so hot under the collar and feel so threatened and defensive everytime s.o. mentions "the Other One".   :Evil or Very Mad: 

I can hear the cries of "burn the heretics" just around the corner.

 :Cool: 

----------

## CKirocZ

I have been using Reiser 4 as long as I have been using Gentoo (about 6 months), and I have had problems with portage, xorg, nvidia-kernel, gnome, glibc, gcc, mozilla, mozilla-firefox, cairo..... Well, you get the idea. I have had no problems with Reiser 4 at all. I have 3 different partitions that are Reiser 4 (mainly to control the disk space usage of portage and ccache and their tmp directories because I have "keepwork" in make.conf FEATURES="") No filesystem problems at all !!!!

I am neither a linux newbie nor am I a grisled veteran but I picked Gentoo to learn more about linux. The support in these forums is second to none, but stop bashing Reiser 4 until you have used it  !  The constant shameless bashing of Reiser 4 is totally uncalled for and only serves to expose the weaknesses and inexperience of those doing the bashing. It also downgrades others opinions of this forum.

No one has said that Reiser 4 is perfectly stable and ready to be used on the largest servers or the most sensitive data. 

Be smart when trying new things, back  up all your important data (even Ext 2, Ext 3 users !!), because all things break, whether it be from user error or hardware failure It will happen to you. I hope you're prepared !!

----------

## joey_knisch

 *sirdilznik wrote:*   

> 
> 
> cent1:  ebuilds for reiser4kernels exist and have existed for a long time(mm,nitro, archck, etc...).  MM is in portage and the others just need to be put in an overlay. 

 I believe you misunderstood what I meant.  I wasn't clear.   While standing on the sidelines for all of these discussions I have come to realize how many r4 people just want it in the Gentoo Sources.  The Gentoo Sources people have taken a bit of a hardline and are saying it won't be there until vanilla.  I think there just needs to be a compromise.  Why not make a reiser4 use flag for the ~x86 Gentoo Sources so that people can deal with it where they want it.  In my experience people are too lazy to keep an overly up to date.

 *sirdilznik wrote:*   

> cent2: I've had power-outages and hard-locks during all types of heavy multiple file-writes.  Never lost/corrupted a single piece of data with R4.  I agree ext3 fanboys need to stop bashing.  I can (and have) broken ext3.

   I am not saying the FS or data is corrupted in the normal sense.  AFAIK the Atomic Writes prevent fs corruption but if the programming for an app is set up a certain way, ( ie if an app has to write to multiple files and only completes flushing one file before power is cut) that app will have problems.

@Gentree:  That's what I was getting at.  People take it so personally.  It is like the Intel/AMD and nVidia/ATI hardware wars used to be.

----------

## codergeek42

 *joey_knisch wrote:*   

> Why not make a reiser4 use flag for the ~x86 Gentoo Sources so that people can deal with it where they want it.  In my experience people are too lazy to keep an overly up to date.

 If they're willing to use a deemed-experimental filesystem for their systems, they are assuredly not too lazy to keep their overlay up-to-date. The reason there is no 'reiser4' USE flag or similar would probably be that it would require that dsd and the other Gentoo kernel maintainers would then have the extra load of maintaining that patchset, which they are not willing to put effort into, as it currently does not play well with many things (such as Extended Attribute support, rigid POSIX file semantics, etc.). It has also been stated by dsd that one of the main goals of Gentoo's kernel tree is to deviate as little as possible from what is released upstream (excluding things like backporting security patches from an upstream release candidate or adding squashfs support for the LiveCD stuff, etc.). Then again, I'm not a Gentoo kernel developer, so I may very well be mistaken. Please speak with dsd or another person on the Gentoo kernel team who is, and they'll likely be happy to clarify this for you.

----------

## joey_knisch

 *codergeek42 wrote:*   

>  *joey_knisch wrote:*   Why not make a reiser4 use flag for the ~x86 Gentoo Sources so that people can deal with it where they want it.  In my experience people are too lazy to keep an overly up to date. If they're willing to use a deemed-experimental filesystem for their systems, they are assuredly not too lazy to keep their overlay up-to-date. The reason there is no 'reiser4' USE flag or similar would probably be that it would require that dsd and the other Gentoo kernel maintainers would then have the extra load of maintaining that patchset, which they are not willing to put effort into, as it currently does not play well with many things (such as Extended Attribute support, rigid POSIX file semantics, etc.). It has also been stated by dsd that one of the main goals of Gentoo's kernel tree is to deviate as little as possible from what is released upstream (excluding things like backporting security patches from an upstream release candidate or adding squashfs support for the LiveCD stuff, etc.). Then again, I'm not a Gentoo kernel developer, so I may very well be mistaken. Please speak with dsd or another person on the Gentoo kernel team who is, and they'll likely be happy to clarify this for you.

   Ok sure.  I don't really know this stuff that well.  I am just looking for a compromise between the two apparently extreme positions.  I don't really have anything on the line since I won't be using r4 for quite some time/ever (except for portage part).

----------

## energyman76b

 *Voltago wrote:*   

>  *1U wrote:*   If people want to use it or not that's their choice to make, not the developers. The problem is they are creating inconveniences for everyone who wants to use it based on their own opinions and hatred of new things. 
> 
> d) If reiser4 is included into mainstream and stuff breaks and data is lost (like it did when reiserfs3 was included, for example), people will come whining to the kernel devs, not to namesys.com. Including not-quite-mature software could damage the kernels reputation for stability.

 

the reiser3 breakage was mostly (all of it) caused by sudden and hidden vm changes, Linus Torvalds made in early 2.4 timeline.

So, Linus changed something, reiser broke because of the changes, people blamed reiserfs.

That is not very fair. The truth is:

everytime a low level subsystem changes, there is a risk of breakage. Reiserfs was the victim of this in its early days, today the devs are much more carefull about it. But it was not reiserfs cault.

----------

## dsd

indeed - the "extreme" approach from the gentoo-sources maintenance side is not any dislike of reiser4, its simply the fact that the cases where we patch the kernel with patches that *aren't* already in Linus' tree is becoming increasingly rare, and this is our aim: deviate from Linus as little as possible.

the USE-flag deal is documented in the FAQ:

http://dev.gentoo.org/~dsd/genpatches/faq.htm

and the more general "mission statement" can be found here:

http://dev.gentoo.org/~dsd/genpatches/about.htm

----------

## Gentree

Seems very fair and sensible. There's a bunch of patched kernels available that offer R4 .

I'm glad to hear there's no hardcore prejudice against R4 at the heart of the dev team. 

Thanks for you efforts.   :Cool: 

----------

