5 ms·

The ReiserFS Filesystem (2000)

31 points by luu 7y ago

qubex 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > But other cases (CockroachDB is one) I think people go overboard with getting offended at names. Like, because they’re repulsed by cockroaches?
      - m-p-3 7y ago
        Or people getting offended by GIMP.
    - blablabla123 7y ago
      > But other cases (CockroachDB is one) I think people go overboard with getting offended at names. But with this name there is a 0.1% chance in any enterprise setting that managers would accept usage of such a DB. At least as long as it's not as mainstream as maybe Redis or MongoDB. (If something is popular enough, the name is to be accepted)
      - lvturner 7y ago
        I mean, MongoDB has a pretty unfortunate name depending on where you are from... https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/mongo/ https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/mongo/ Didn't seem to get in it's way too much.
        mindcrime 7y ago
        Part of me still wants to create a database called MondoDB. Tagline "The Gnarly database for all your Righteous data!"
        SAI_Peregrinus 7y ago
        Candygram for MongoDB.
      - dspillett 7y ago
        This is why the paid version of "Agent Ransack" is instead called "File Locator Pro". If I ever get around to releasing any of my own little projects they will have deliberately slightly offensive names to take advantage of this as a user filtering property. If at some point I want the difficult & demanding sort of user who is going to take issue with a project name, I can rename at that time. (of course if a project is intended to be breadwinner that may be a poor strategy!).
      - thrwaway69 7y ago
        I don't meant to be rude but from what I have seen, american people seem highly influenced by their corporates to remain "clean" without personality or quirkiness that isn't approved. I have seen this leak into many critics (may be biased due to the population size) where they sometimes expect a hobby project to have professional naming on some really arbitrary principles that are specific to them. Just odd to me or find a product unappealing to the name not sounding "clean". Cockroachdb sounds really intriguing to me, enough that I checked their website and read a few posts. First thought that came to mind when hearing it was that the db might have something to do based on resilience and replication like a cockroach.
    - qubex 7y ago
      I have my roots in Germany and Italy where it’s pretty common to either have or know people who have “historically notorious” surnames, and therefore the whole idea of “burning names” never caught on (fortunately, I might add).
      - SilasX 7y ago
        Except Hitler.
        bhaak 7y ago
        Hitler was a rare (maybe even unique?) name to begin with, being a spelling variation of "Hiedler" for unknown reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alois_Hitler#Change_of_surname https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alois_Hitler#Change_of_surname
        mhd 7y ago
        'Adolf' on the other hand went basically extinct.
        big_chungus 7y ago
        That's much easier with a first name because they aren't typically passed down. Some families do to an extent, but not like last names.
      - slightwinder 7y ago
        With the exception of adolf, hitler and other evil masterminds. To some degree typical mobbing-names could be also seen as burned.
        Tomte 7y ago
        https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fdie-partei.net%2Fnortheim%2Ffiles%2F2018%2F09%2FEU-Liste.png&f=1&nofb=1 https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F... They found people named "Bomb, war, Göbbels, Speer, Keitel, Heß, Bormann, Eichmann" to run for Parliament.
    - gaius_baltar 7y ago
      > 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 7y ago
        > 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 7y ago
        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 7y ago
        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%22_lettercombinaties https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgisch_kenteken#%22Verboden%...
        PhantomGremlin 7y ago
        the numbers 18, 28 or 88 Wikipedia tells me that 88 is a code number for "Heil Hitler". But what is the significance of 18 or 28?
        numlock86 7y ago
        > But what is the significance of 18 or 28? 18 Adolf Hitler 28 Blood and Honour Same as with 88, the numbers represent the position in the alphabet.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - jeffdavis 7y ago
      I wouldn't consider the name "Reiser" to be burned in most contexts. It's a normal name. But in this case the name is reminding us that the product was literally lead and developed by a murderer.
  - qubex 7y ago
    To be perfectly frank, there’s no getting around the fact that a convicted murderer designed this filesystem, so… I don’t really see why changing it would make much of a difference. I don’t really get the “burned names” thing; it verges on “cancel culture” (which, from my distant cultural remove, strikes me as rather insane). I carry a surname uncomfortably close to that of widely-known Nazi Reichsminister, and in both Germany and Italy (countries I herald from) it is not uncommon for several acquaintances to have surnames with sinister historic overtones. It just happens. People don’t think too much about it.
    - Neil44 7y ago
      I agree in principle but in practice and where you’re ‘selling’ something, why rub people’s noses in it if you don’t have to.
    - chapium 7y ago
      Imo it should be burned. Not for everything but just for new versions of projects he himself worked on. Imagine if Victoria from Victoria's secret turned out to be an axe murderer and they kept the business name. The name is not the issue, but the the nameholder associated with it and the project.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dspillett 7y ago
    > like if kdenlive was named “Weinstein” At this point though, how many people know the name for that reason? Even at the time, the case hardly had the public notoriety that the Weinstein case has now. > refuse to change the name for some odd reason Changing the name could be detrimental as it could be mistaken for a new and relatively untested filesystem rather than one that has a long history.
  - mumblemumble 7y ago
    You don't get to die on a hill if you don't stay on the hill.
- pantalaimon 7y ago
  There is even Reiser5: https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/ee55ce28-2434-d3c6-0d2d-2ed1ea8f35d7@gmail.com/ https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/ee55ce28-2434-d3c6-0d2d-2ed1...
fsiefken 7y ago
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-Compression-For-Linux-5.6 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=F2FS-Com... https://sudonull.com/post/126002-As-I-wrote-LZ4-compression-plugin-for-Reiser4 https://sudonull.com/post/126002-As-I-wrote-LZ4-compression-... https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Reiser4_Howto https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Reiser4_Howto
david_draco 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Is there any more information on how they accomplished this?
  - david_draco 7y ago
    "Plugins" 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#Software_Libre_... https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/V4#The_Software_Engineering_Lurking_Below_File_Plugins https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/V4#The_Software_En... 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 7y ago
      Thank you for the link - the whole page is a really interesting read.
billpg 7y ago
As I read this page, 19 comments are about the name, 1 comment is about the file system itself.
- mastax 7y ago
  If the name were changed: > Previously known as ReiserFS. > The guy who made it killed his wife.
DonHopkins 7y ago
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_file_systems&oldid=209063556#Features https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_fil...
- thomble 7y ago
  "Murders Your Wife"
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    ... How did that make it into Wikipedia? How has it not been removed!? Edit: Oh, that's an old version. My mistake.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  Looks like ZFS does? (especially now that it does have native encryption)
- abtinf 7y ago
  You linked to an old version (from 2008!) of that wiki page that contains vandalism (a column labeled "Murders your wife"). Why? Given your comment "no other file system has all the features of ReiserFS or Reiser4", I am guessing it is a crude and disgusting "joke". diff between the page you linked and the current version: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_file_systems&diff=cur&oldid=209063556 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_fil...
- mises 7y ago
  Who cares who wrote it? Good code is good code, and Reiser is still often the best option for storing lots of small files. I don't think it makes sense to change the name, but it's rude and vulgar to deliberately link to an old version of a page that makes fun of someone's murder.
linsomniac 7y ago
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 7y ago
Hopefully development can continue again in March.
rabite 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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)_/¯
  - danmg 7y ago
    Is it really 'justice' if he could have only gotten three years with that plea agreement he turned down? If anything he's the victim of his own Asperger's for thinking that proof in a court of law is the same thing as a logical proof.
  - rabite 7y ago
    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.

31 points by luu 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > But other cases (CockroachDB is one) I think people go overboard with getting offended at names. Like, because they’re repulsed by cockroaches?
    - m-p-3 7y ago
      Or people getting offended by GIMP.
  - blablabla123 7y ago
    > But other cases (CockroachDB is one) I think people go overboard with getting offended at names. But with this name there is a 0.1% chance in any enterprise setting that managers would accept usage of such a DB. At least as long as it's not as mainstream as maybe Redis or MongoDB. (If something is popular enough, the name is to be accepted)
    - lvturner 7y ago
      I mean, MongoDB has a pretty unfortunate name depending on where you are from... https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/mongo/ https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/mongo/ Didn't seem to get in it's way too much.
      - mindcrime 7y ago
        Part of me still wants to create a database called MondoDB. Tagline "The Gnarly database for all your Righteous data!"
      - SAI_Peregrinus 7y ago
        Candygram for MongoDB.
    - dspillett 7y ago
      This is why the paid version of "Agent Ransack" is instead called "File Locator Pro". If I ever get around to releasing any of my own little projects they will have deliberately slightly offensive names to take advantage of this as a user filtering property. If at some point I want the difficult & demanding sort of user who is going to take issue with a project name, I can rename at that time. (of course if a project is intended to be breadwinner that may be a poor strategy!).
    - thrwaway69 7y ago
      I don't meant to be rude but from what I have seen, american people seem highly influenced by their corporates to remain "clean" without personality or quirkiness that isn't approved. I have seen this leak into many critics (may be biased due to the population size) where they sometimes expect a hobby project to have professional naming on some really arbitrary principles that are specific to them. Just odd to me or find a product unappealing to the name not sounding "clean". Cockroachdb sounds really intriguing to me, enough that I checked their website and read a few posts. First thought that came to mind when hearing it was that the db might have something to do based on resilience and replication like a cockroach.
  - qubex 7y ago
    I have my roots in Germany and Italy where it’s pretty common to either have or know people who have “historically notorious” surnames, and therefore the whole idea of “burning names” never caught on (fortunately, I might add).
    - SilasX 7y ago
      Except Hitler.
      - bhaak 7y ago
        Hitler was a rare (maybe even unique?) name to begin with, being a spelling variation of "Hiedler" for unknown reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alois_Hitler#Change_of_surname https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alois_Hitler#Change_of_surname
        mhd 7y ago
        'Adolf' on the other hand went basically extinct.
        big_chungus 7y ago
        That's much easier with a first name because they aren't typically passed down. Some families do to an extent, but not like last names.
    - slightwinder 7y ago
      With the exception of adolf, hitler and other evil masterminds. To some degree typical mobbing-names could be also seen as burned.
      - Tomte 7y ago
        https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fdie-partei.net%2Fnortheim%2Ffiles%2F2018%2F09%2FEU-Liste.png&f=1&nofb=1 https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F... They found people named "Bomb, war, Göbbels, Speer, Keitel, Heß, Bormann, Eichmann" to run for Parliament.
  - gaius_baltar 7y ago
    > 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 7y ago
      > 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 7y ago
        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 7y ago
        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%22_lettercombinaties https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgisch_kenteken#%22Verboden%...
      - PhantomGremlin 7y ago
        the numbers 18, 28 or 88 Wikipedia tells me that 88 is a code number for "Heil Hitler". But what is the significance of 18 or 28?
        numlock86 7y ago
        > But what is the significance of 18 or 28? 18 Adolf Hitler 28 Blood and Honour Same as with 88, the numbers represent the position in the alphabet.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jeffdavis 7y ago
    I wouldn't consider the name "Reiser" to be burned in most contexts. It's a normal name. But in this case the name is reminding us that the product was literally lead and developed by a murderer.
- qubex 7y ago
  To be perfectly frank, there’s no getting around the fact that a convicted murderer designed this filesystem, so… I don’t really see why changing it would make much of a difference. I don’t really get the “burned names” thing; it verges on “cancel culture” (which, from my distant cultural remove, strikes me as rather insane). I carry a surname uncomfortably close to that of widely-known Nazi Reichsminister, and in both Germany and Italy (countries I herald from) it is not uncommon for several acquaintances to have surnames with sinister historic overtones. It just happens. People don’t think too much about it.
  - Neil44 7y ago
    I agree in principle but in practice and where you’re ‘selling’ something, why rub people’s noses in it if you don’t have to.
  - chapium 7y ago
    Imo it should be burned. Not for everything but just for new versions of projects he himself worked on. Imagine if Victoria from Victoria's secret turned out to be an axe murderer and they kept the business name. The name is not the issue, but the the nameholder associated with it and the project.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dspillett 7y ago
  > like if kdenlive was named “Weinstein” At this point though, how many people know the name for that reason? Even at the time, the case hardly had the public notoriety that the Weinstein case has now. > refuse to change the name for some odd reason Changing the name could be detrimental as it could be mistaken for a new and relatively untested filesystem rather than one that has a long history.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  You don't get to die on a hill if you don't stay on the hill.
pantalaimon 7y ago
There is even Reiser5: https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/ee55ce28-2434-d3c6-0d2d-2ed1ea8f35d7@gmail.com/ https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/ee55ce28-2434-d3c6-0d2d-2ed1...

fsiefken 7y ago

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-Compression-For-Linux-5.6 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=F2FS-Com... https://sudonull.com/post/126002-As-I-wrote-LZ4-compression-plugin-for-Reiser4 https://sudonull.com/post/126002-As-I-wrote-LZ4-compression-... https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Reiser4_Howto https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Reiser4_Howto

david_draco 7y ago

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 7y ago
Is there any more information on how they accomplished this?
- david_draco 7y ago
  "Plugins" 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#Software_Libre_... https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/V4#The_Software_Engineering_Lurking_Below_File_Plugins https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/V4#The_Software_En... 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 7y ago
    Thank you for the link - the whole page is a really interesting read.

billpg 7y ago

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

mastax 7y ago
If the name were changed: > Previously known as ReiserFS. > The guy who made it killed his wife.

DonHopkins 7y ago

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_file_systems&oldid=209063556#Features https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_fil...

thomble 7y ago
"Murders Your Wife"
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  ... How did that make it into Wikipedia? How has it not been removed!? Edit: Oh, that's an old version. My mistake.
yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
Looks like ZFS does? (especially now that it does have native encryption)
abtinf 7y ago
You linked to an old version (from 2008!) of that wiki page that contains vandalism (a column labeled "Murders your wife"). Why? Given your comment "no other file system has all the features of ReiserFS or Reiser4", I am guessing it is a crude and disgusting "joke". diff between the page you linked and the current version: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_file_systems&diff=cur&oldid=209063556 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_fil...
mises 7y ago
Who cares who wrote it? Good code is good code, and Reiser is still often the best option for storing lots of small files. I don't think it makes sense to change the name, but it's rude and vulgar to deliberately link to an old version of a page that makes fun of someone's murder.

linsomniac 7y ago

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 7y ago

Hopefully development can continue again in March.

rabite 7y ago

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 7y ago
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)_/¯
- danmg 7y ago
  Is it really 'justice' if he could have only gotten three years with that plea agreement he turned down? If anything he's the victim of his own Asperger's for thinking that proof in a court of law is the same thing as a logical proof.
- rabite 7y ago
  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.