I am looking at a number of file systems for a huge home theater machine. It currently has over 13 terabytes of storage. On of the things I want to look at is Reiserfs V4. I know all about the pissing contest that is going on about reiserfs. Even Linus says it’s between two guys on the Linux file system team that Hans Reiser pissed off. Well it should be obvious that dear old Hans was a Richard Cranium of the first order. And he will get lots of time to contemplate his fate where he is, and that is as it should be.
But I see no reason we should cut off our noses because he was a jerk. I want to take a look at reiserfs V4. From all the bench marks out there it has beaten everybody hands down. Hans wasn’t the only person that worked on it. It was a team effort with Hans writing the checks. So to can all the effort the team put into it seems infantile at best.
But now comes my problem. Where is the source code for reiserfs V4? Does anybody have a copy? The argument is the source is not at a standard that would be allowed into the kernel. Well ok I will except that for now at face value and lets look at the source. But it seems to have been purged from the face of the earth.
And this brings me to another one of my pet peeves that is building inside Linux. It’s the lack of freedom that Linux is taking. Way back in the early nineties freedom is what interested me in Linux. But now it seems that there are a small group of people that have control of what goes into the kernel. Then we have another group of people that control what you can do with their distribution. A perfect example is Ubuntu. I personally think Ubntu is getting the users ready to buy software that will only work with ubuntu and nobody else. and it will be closed source so you can’t change it to work with anybody else. I find this disgusting and I hope you would also. And don’t think you favorite distrio will be far behind. Ubuntu even has a
“Market Place” to sell said software in their distro.
So back to the problem at had. Who has the source for reiserfs V4 and any instructions on how to get it up and running?
Thank you for you help and you time listening to my little rant.
As you have discovered, the Namesys website is currently down and so the most you can get is the patches to an existing system. Not sure I would want to trust a filesystem which appears to be no longer under development.
Also, one of the selling points of Reiser was its handling of smaller files but my guess is that you won’t have many of those. Have you thought of btrfs which is available under openSUSE? If you are all Linux you could go the whole hog with EFI, GPT and Grub2.
i don’t expect you will find v4 as an install option on any of the
openSUSE version releases in the near future…as yet, it is not
included in the 3.x kernel tree…
and, by the way, if you get it up and running on your openSUSE movie
machine and have a problem, i have no idea where you will someone with
v4 experience/knowledge to help you.
in fact, v3 Reiserfs knowledge and support is already as scarce as hens
teeth here!!
–
DD
openSUSE®, the “German Automobiles” of operating systems
> Also, one of the selling points of Reiser was its handling of smaller
> files but my guess is that you won’t have many of those.
If you have maildir storage, or news storage, it does make a huge
difference. Or something simple: try to compile the kernel first under
reiserfs, then under ext3. And time it.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
On 2011-09-26 09:26, argon99 wrote:
>
> I am looking at a number of file systems for a huge home theater
> machine. It currently has over 13 terabytes of storage.
Use XFS. It is very good on large files and heavy loads.
> But I see no reason we should cut off our noses because he was a jerk.
> I want to take a look at reiserfs V4. From all the bench marks out
> there it has beaten everybody hands down. Hans wasn’t the only person
> that worked on it. It was a team effort with Hans writing the checks.
> So to can all the effort the team put into it seems infantile at best.
Unfortunately, it seems to be dead
Time ago, R3 succeeded because distros like SuSE put reiserfs on their
distros and even used it as default filesystem - before it was accepted
into the kernel officially.
Now, openSUSE has the policy of not patching the kernel, or keep it to the
bare minimum. They will not put R4 on it.
R3 was (is) wonderful. It has some caveats, like not expanding well, I
think it uses one thread only or something like that.
R4 promises a lot, but… :-/
> And this brings me to another one of my pet peeves that is building
> inside Linux. It’s the lack of freedom that Linux is taking. Way back
> in the early nineties freedom is what interested me in Linux. But now
> it seems that there are a small group of people that have control of
> what goes into the kernel. Then we have another group of people that
> control what you can do with their distribution.
It has been always like that, only that you did not notice.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
On 09/26/2011 10:46 AM, gogalthorp wrote:
>
> Nothing stopping you from putting anything you want into the kernel
> except the level of your knowledge.
Although the above statement is true, I would recommend against using Reiser4
for any data that you would not want to lose.
The suggestion to use XFS was a good one. It is particularly good with large
files, especially when deleting them. If it makes any difference on your system,
it also has the tools to defragment files and coalesce free space.
