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Personally I've always really liked ReiserFS. The collected storage of small files, the storage of the tails of files, the balanced tree structure, and the fast

Personally I've always really liked ReiserFS. The collected storage of small files, the storage of the tails of files, the balanced tree structure, and the fast journaling gave better performance in reads, writes, boot time, and storage efficiency than most file systems. The focus on small files, which were and arguably still are most files on a typical system, was a big key to this. It made it ideal for storing things like configuration files, email in maildir format, email spools, version control repositories, source directories, and many executables. The logical successor was supposed to be btrfs, but that project IMHO may never be ready for production use. All that said, if it's hurting kernel development and almost nobody is using it, perhaps a deprecation cycle is due. Maybe bcachefs is a good replacement? Or perhaps nobody cares about efficiently storing small files these days at all, and we just all go to XFS, ext4, and ZFS. I think dropping it during a short period is detrimental to users. Maybe a two or three version warning is due.

pmarreck 5y ago
Hear, hear on replacing reiserfs with bcachefs. Kent Overstreet could use the support, the project looks good, and to my knowledge he is not a murderer.
- cestith 5y ago
  The salacious details are always part of this discussion and outside of a very carefully scoped conversation like was requested on the list I think that's always going to happen. On just a technical basis, though, I think bcachefs pays a lot of attention to many of the same issues ReiserFS does, gets more current maintenance, and is maintained more along the lines of kernel interfaces other filesystems use. That last one is the strongest point made in the email to the list. The advantage of having the creator, designer, and lead maintainer available among free society is definitely real. Regardless of the murder - even if we can separate the man's technical work from the rest of his life activities - he's not doing a lot of work on his creation while he's in custody. He's certainly not going to be furloughed to hackathons or conferences from a murder sentence.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    Hans' personality got in the way of technical work in more than one way; Reiser4 never got upstreamed partly (if not mostly) because he had too big of a chip on his shoulder to make the changes requested from upstream.
Syonyk 5y ago
It's great for small files, but it's also got some really nasty little corner cases. You do not store ReiserFS filesystem images on ReiserFS filesystems without encryption, or the next time you run fsck, you'll end up with the two filesystems oddly merged into something entirely useless. I'm not sure if that's been fixed, I got a bit tired of the exotica for general daily driver systems, and ext3/ext4 cover my needs well enough. I'm not sure btrfs is a sane replacement, though. It's exceedingly complex, and I try to avoid needless complexity where possible.
- sterwill 5y ago
  That's one heck of an edge case! How does fsck manage to completely confuse filesystem metadata and data like this? Surely this is only if there's corruption in the (outer) filesystem, right?
  - actionfromafar 5y ago
    No, the meta-data is somehow distributed and fsck can pick up pieces of it. I don't think you have to encrypt the image to avoid the edge case, a compress of the image should be enough. It still sucks though.
    - cout 5y ago
      How do other filesystems avoid this? It seems like a hard problem in general.
      - formerly_proven 5y ago
        Many other filesystems have one or more arrays for metadata. Sometimes these are formatted like files themselves. So a tool to recover it only has to guess at those contiguous arrays, instead of considering essentially any block metadata.
  - dale_glass 5y ago
    I think it was the --rebuild-tree argument, which as I understand tries to fix an otherwise completely broken filesystem by searching for anything that looks like metadata and gluing it back together. I've not looked at reiserfs in many years though, so I could be mis-remembering here.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
> The logical successor was supposed to be btrfs, but that project IMHO may never be ready for production use. https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Production_Users https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Production_Users Facebook deployed it on millions of servers. Is that production enough? Synology NAS devices also use it.
- api 5y ago
  Lots of people seem to turn up their nose at btrfs. Is there a reason for that? Was it perhaps launched before it was really ready and people still remember early versions?
  - j16sdiz 5y ago
    In their earlier days, the ENOSPCE bug corrupts the filesystem. If you do a heavy random write workload, it fills up the disk pretty quickly and require a re-balance _before_ ran out of space. Of cause you can do nocow on those files, but than it lost all the checksuming/snapshotting features.
  - pnutjam 5y ago
    Yes, the only real problems are edge cases. I use it all the time.
    - gh02t 5y ago
      I agree, I love BTRFS and have used it for ages, including some small scale production systems. But I know it still has some edge cases as you mention, which made me wonder: what is the impediment to having those cases fixed? BTRFS has been around long enough and even has some decent commercial support from a few vendors, so it seems like we can't just discount it as "it's open source and nobody is motivated to fix those long tail problems." Is there some kind of design issue that makes them hard?
      - tinco 5y ago
        edit: sorry, cheap shot at Facebook. I have no idea why BTRFS edge cases are not being fixed. What I do know is that ZFS recently released a feature specifically for the hobbyist/frugal community. The feature allows you to grow an existing RAID array, something a financially sound business would never do. So no customer of anyone supporting ZFS would ever use this, and it took significant effort of ZFS developers to implement this. Not to mention that introducing feature potentially introduces weird behaviour in ZFS that might endanger its (reputation of) stability. I'm super happy with it, (as my company was not in fact financially sound when we invested in our on-premise storage hardware), but if I was CEO of ZFS I'm not sure I'd sign off on it.
TOGoS 5y ago
I'm no big company, but I've been using btrfs on my Raspberry Pi file server and its disk has been sitting there spinning for something like 8 years with no issues yet. I keep hearing that "btrfs isn't production-ready" but I wouldn't know it from experience.
- cestith 5y ago
  Perhaps you never lost data from it years after it was billed as ready for use, but many people did. I've never lost data on Reiser3 or Reiser4. I've not used bcachefs or f2fs much yet, but I've never lost data on those either.

pmarreck 5y ago

Hear, hear on replacing reiserfs with bcachefs. Kent Overstreet could use the support, the project looks good, and to my knowledge he is not a murderer.

cestith 5y ago
The salacious details are always part of this discussion and outside of a very carefully scoped conversation like was requested on the list I think that's always going to happen. On just a technical basis, though, I think bcachefs pays a lot of attention to many of the same issues ReiserFS does, gets more current maintenance, and is maintained more along the lines of kernel interfaces other filesystems use. That last one is the strongest point made in the email to the list. The advantage of having the creator, designer, and lead maintainer available among free society is definitely real. Regardless of the murder - even if we can separate the man's technical work from the rest of his life activities - he's not doing a lot of work on his creation while he's in custody. He's certainly not going to be furloughed to hackathons or conferences from a murder sentence.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  Hans' personality got in the way of technical work in more than one way; Reiser4 never got upstreamed partly (if not mostly) because he had too big of a chip on his shoulder to make the changes requested from upstream.

Syonyk 5y ago

It's great for small files, but it's also got some really nasty little corner cases. You do not store ReiserFS filesystem images on ReiserFS filesystems without encryption, or the next time you run fsck, you'll end up with the two filesystems oddly merged into something entirely useless. I'm not sure if that's been fixed, I got a bit tired of the exotica for general daily driver systems, and ext3/ext4 cover my needs well enough. I'm not sure btrfs is a sane replacement, though. It's exceedingly complex, and I try to avoid needless complexity where possible.

sterwill 5y ago
That's one heck of an edge case! How does fsck manage to completely confuse filesystem metadata and data like this? Surely this is only if there's corruption in the (outer) filesystem, right?
- actionfromafar 5y ago
  No, the meta-data is somehow distributed and fsck can pick up pieces of it. I don't think you have to encrypt the image to avoid the edge case, a compress of the image should be enough. It still sucks though.
  - cout 5y ago
    How do other filesystems avoid this? It seems like a hard problem in general.
    - formerly_proven 5y ago
      Many other filesystems have one or more arrays for metadata. Sometimes these are formatted like files themselves. So a tool to recover it only has to guess at those contiguous arrays, instead of considering essentially any block metadata.
- dale_glass 5y ago
  I think it was the --rebuild-tree argument, which as I understand tries to fix an otherwise completely broken filesystem by searching for anything that looks like metadata and gluing it back together. I've not looked at reiserfs in many years though, so I could be mis-remembering here.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

> The logical successor was supposed to be btrfs, but that project IMHO may never be ready for production use. https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Production_Users https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Production_Users Facebook deployed it on millions of servers. Is that production enough? Synology NAS devices also use it.

api 5y ago
Lots of people seem to turn up their nose at btrfs. Is there a reason for that? Was it perhaps launched before it was really ready and people still remember early versions?
- j16sdiz 5y ago
  In their earlier days, the ENOSPCE bug corrupts the filesystem. If you do a heavy random write workload, it fills up the disk pretty quickly and require a re-balance _before_ ran out of space. Of cause you can do nocow on those files, but than it lost all the checksuming/snapshotting features.
- pnutjam 5y ago
  Yes, the only real problems are edge cases. I use it all the time.
  - gh02t 5y ago
    I agree, I love BTRFS and have used it for ages, including some small scale production systems. But I know it still has some edge cases as you mention, which made me wonder: what is the impediment to having those cases fixed? BTRFS has been around long enough and even has some decent commercial support from a few vendors, so it seems like we can't just discount it as "it's open source and nobody is motivated to fix those long tail problems." Is there some kind of design issue that makes them hard?
    - tinco 5y ago
      edit: sorry, cheap shot at Facebook. I have no idea why BTRFS edge cases are not being fixed. What I do know is that ZFS recently released a feature specifically for the hobbyist/frugal community. The feature allows you to grow an existing RAID array, something a financially sound business would never do. So no customer of anyone supporting ZFS would ever use this, and it took significant effort of ZFS developers to implement this. Not to mention that introducing feature potentially introduces weird behaviour in ZFS that might endanger its (reputation of) stability. I'm super happy with it, (as my company was not in fact financially sound when we invested in our on-premise storage hardware), but if I was CEO of ZFS I'm not sure I'd sign off on it.

TOGoS 5y ago

I'm no big company, but I've been using btrfs on my Raspberry Pi file server and its disk has been sitting there spinning for something like 8 years with no issues yet. I keep hearing that "btrfs isn't production-ready" but I wouldn't know it from experience.

cestith 5y ago
Perhaps you never lost data from it years after it was billed as ready for use, but many people did. I've never lost data on Reiser3 or Reiser4. I've not used bcachefs or f2fs much yet, but I've never lost data on those either.