Following Andrew Morton's [interview] recent posting of 2.6.0-test4-mm2 [forum], Christian Axelsson asked, "Is there any work [being] done on getting reiser4 into mm? I havent tried it myself yet but I've heard of colliding code in [the] scheduler". Andrew replied that a merging effort hasn't been made, but that he'd be interested in making it happen in a month or two so long as the namesys developers were willing to commit to providing him with up-to-date patches. Hans Reiser offered:
"We would be happy to make that commitment, and happy to switch from creating snapshots every week to pushing to you and linking to you from our website. Several people have asked for this besides Christian."
In other words, it looks like -mm users will soon have easy access to the resier4 filesystem.
From: Christian Axelsson [email blocked] To: Andrew Morton [email blocked] Subject: Re: 2.6.0-test4-mm2 Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 14:58:51 +0200 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Is there any work beeing done on getting reiser4 into mm? I havent tried it myself yet but Ive heard of colliding code in scheduler. - -- Christan Axelsson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQE/TKpTyqbmAWw8VdkRApmoAKDtoTUkjFSFucpKbL7r6zCWOvMmUACg9sU7 pDS6IWTaHW6wiOg+qcOsXQA= =jrVw -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
From: Andrew Morton [email blocked] Subject: Re: 2.6.0-test4-mm2 Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 10:25:22 -0700 Christian Axelsson [email blocked] wrote: > > Is there any work beeing done on getting reiser4 into mm? Nope. It would be fun to get it in there so people could play with it more easily, but not for a month or two (guess) and I'd need some commitment from the namesys guys to keep me up to date, else it'd be a waste of everyone's time.
From: Hans Reiser [email blocked] Subject: Re: 2.6.0-test4-mm2 Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 21:59:23 +0400 Andrew Morton wrote: >It would be fun to get it in there so people could play with it more >easily, but not for a month or two (guess) and I'd need some commitment >from the namesys guys to keep me up to date, else it'd be a waste of >everyone's time. > We would be happy to make that commitment, and happy to switch from creating snapshots every week to pushing to you and linking to you from our website. Several people have asked for this besides Christian. -- Hans
From: Christian Axelsson [email blocked] Subject: Re: 2.6.0-test4-mm2 Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 21:48:54 +0200 I think it would be a good thing to get it in mm as in serves as testingbase for linus tree. It will reach more users and that means more testing (but also more whining if option not marked VERY UNSTABLE or something like that). -- Christan Axelsson
Great!
I'm just an end-user (more or less, actually now a PHB, eek!), but some people here in-the-know are recommending ReiserFS (not Reiser4) over Ext3, so I guess this is great news!
ReiserFS vs ext3
The line between ReiserFS 3 and ext3 is not at all clear cut. ext3 is _very_ well tested and tuned, and is probably now the most (CPU) scalable filesystem in the tree (yes, that includes XFS), and now with htree you get a very solid all round filesystem.
ReiserFS 4, however, looks like it might eat ext3's lunch. But it obviously won't be production stable for quite a while - it doesn't even have a working fsck yet.
Getting it into mm and even mainline (EXPERIMENTAL/DANGEROUS of course) is great news for testers and developers, though it is only meaningful to end users in that increased testing should mean an earlier "production ready" status.
Congratulations to Hans and the team though, this is a very exciting project and my next install will quite probably be Reiser 4.
My guess is that ext2/3 will
My guess is that ext2/3 will keep first place in low CPU usage, but that's not the bottleneck with today's computers and Reiser4 may well strike a better balance giving higher overall performance on all common workloads. Personally I look forward to see tools taking advantage of Reiser4s unique database-like features.
CPU usage
Well from the benchmarks I've seen, ReiserFS 4 isn't much worse than ext3 in CPU usage. Sure you see double the cpu usage in some, but its often doing double the useful IO.
Re: ReiserFS vs ext3
ReiserFS definately makes a computer feel more responsive (expecially from the command line when a user wants to tab complete something). However, (this from someone who has experience this on numerious occasions) if the computer crashes and a ReiserFS partition is in use you can almost count on file corruption.
file corruption
one of the features of reiser4 is that it is atomic -- makes file corruption much less likely
PHB?
What is a "PHB"?
PHB
Pointy-Haired Boss; mid-level management person; ref. Scott Adams' "Dilbert"
-mm
What stand -mm for?
thats easy
Merry Meats, Andrew's day job. He's a butcher when he's not hacking kernels.
Easy?
He's a butcher when he is hacking kernels!!
Aaahh calm down I'm only joking.
-mm
Memory Management?
-mm
Morton's Mess ?