
The ReiserFS Filesystem (2000) - luu
http://p-nand-q.com/download/rfstool/reiserfs_docs.html
======
qubex
I was a big fan of ReiserFS “back in the day”.

While many are no doubt aware of the trial and conviction for his wife’s
murder, I find that almost nobody is aware that a successor (Reiser4) was also
in development:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiser4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiser4)

~~~
flatiron
I believe it is still in active development and they refuse to change the name
for some odd reason. It’s like if kdenlive was named “Weinstein” wouldn’t you
want to change it?

~~~
dijit
I mean, I get it. I truly do, but part of me hates this idea of names being
"burned".

This name is a direct link to the person, and he should not be immortalised
like that. But other cases (CockroachDB is one) I think people go overboard
with getting offended at names.

Names typically have power when we only associate them with a single thing. If
we have many things with similar names then one of them being terrible, no
good, or awful does not directly come to mind when the word arises.

~~~
gaius_baltar
> But other cases (CockroachDB is one)

And GIMP. Some people just work so hard to get offended by an acronym that
happens to also be an almost-unknown slang, that they created a fork called
Glimpse.

That project declares that the name alone prevented adoption by thousands of
companies and universities. If this is true, we should expect Glimpse adoption
to skyrocket immediately.

~~~
numlock86
> Some people just work so had to get offended by an acronym [...]

That's nothing compared to German law: You won't see a single license plate
there that has the numbers 18, 28 or 88 on it. Although numbers like 318 or
288 would be fine ...

~~~
gerikson
Swedish license plates (currently in the form of "ABC 12E" are screened for
3-letter combos like "CIA", "KGB", "KKK" and of course "KUK". Such plates are
not issued.

~~~
kmm
Belgian license plates also have 3 letters, and there is a list of 99
forbidden combinations. Most of them are slurs, swears, political parties or
things like SEX or BOM (bomb). No idea about some of them, like KKQ.

[https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgisch_kenteken#%22Verboden%...](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgisch_kenteken#%22Verboden%22_lettercombinaties)

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david_draco
The real innovation of ReiserFS was to set up a development environment where
they could develop, profile a new feature, repeat, multiple times a day.
That's how they got such an amazingly performant FS: Short feedback cycles.

~~~
BuildTheRobots
Is there any more information on how they accomplished this?

~~~
david_draco
"Plugins"

[https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/V4#Software_Libre_...](https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/V4#Software_Libre_Takes_More_Than_A_License_
---_It_Takes_A_Design)

[https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/V4#The_Software_En...](https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/V4#The_Software_Engineering_Lurking_Below_File_Plugins)

They have some text where it shows they thought deeply about the meaning of
names and domains, and how to develop file systems, what is important, etc.

~~~
BuildTheRobots
Thank you for the link - the whole page is a really interesting read.

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fsiefken
I found it very useful for transparent partition compression a few years ago
(on a bootable usb stick). ZFS takes more system memory. Nowadays I would
consider F2FS compression.
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=F2FS-
Com...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=F2FS-Compression-
For-Linux-5.6)

[https://sudonull.com/post/126002-As-I-wrote-
LZ4-compression-...](https://sudonull.com/post/126002-As-I-wrote-
LZ4-compression-plugin-for-Reiser4)

[https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Reiser4_Howto](https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Reiser4_Howto)

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billpg
As I read this page, 19 comments are about the name, 1 comment is about the
file system itself.

~~~
mastax
If the name were changed:

> Previously known as ReiserFS.

> The guy who made it killed his wife.

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rabite
Reiser is up for parole this year. The hearing is in March. I myself don't
have a lot of public respectability, but if you are a CS PhD or occupy a
notable position at a tech company you might be able to mail the parole board.
Murdering your wife is detestable but I don't think he will ever find another
woman to marry him and I don't think he would commit murder under any other
circumstances. I don't think he is a continuing danger to society and the
world would benefit if Reiser were allowed to continue his work.

~~~
incomplete
there's a lot of "don't think" in your post, and tbh, you're talking about
someone who premeditatively killed his wife, hid her body, researched how to
get away with murder, plead not guilty, and finally accepted a plea for 2nd
degree murder in exchange for giving police the location of his wife's body.

so, "if you're a CS PhD or occupy a notable position at a tech company", i
would recommend some introspection on what's more important: justice or a
filesystem.

personally, i'm on the side of justice. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
rabite
He's gonna be homeless, without family, with a 60 million judgement over his
head. He's spent over a decade in prison. Justice has been served. If he gets
out, he can start earning some money to pay his kids (who are the major living
victims of his crime) that restitution AND he can do cutting edge computer
science research that benefits the entire Linux community.

Sometimes justice needs to be more than just retributive.

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linsomniac
I managed a system that really benefitted from Rieser. Reiserfs's idea of a
"small file" was 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than most other filesystems,
and this system stored map tiles of the entire globe, many, many of which were
37 byte long all blue tiles. Reiserfs stored it in a fraction of what ext or
xfs would take.

Ideally some meta-tile format would have been used, like with mod_tile, or
some deduplication or hard linking, but reiserfs just handled it like a champ.

------
danmg
Hopefully development can continue again in March.

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DonHopkins
Feature comparison of file systems -- no other file system has all the
features of ReiserFS or Reiser4:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_fil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_file_systems&oldid=209063556#Features)

~~~
thomble
"Murders Your Wife"

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
... How did that make it into Wikipedia? How has it not been removed!?

Edit: Oh, that's an old version. My mistake.

