[CentOS] Calling All FS Fanatics

Wed Oct 4 00:06:37 UTC 2006
Steve Bergman <sbergman at rueb.com>

On Tue, 2006-10-03 at 16:44 -0700, Nathan Grennan wrote:

> >   
> I was just about to post this. It is very informative of why reiserfs is 
> a bad idea.

And by extension, not just v3, but also v4.

I remember back when Linux had no journalling filesystems.  Stephen
Tweedie said he was working on adding a journalling layer to ext2.
Several months after he announced that, and very curious, I emailed to
ask him how things were going.  He said he'd have something for people
to look at in about 6 months.

A year and a half passed before he had something he felt was worthy for
the world to see.  Progress seemed positively glacial.

Some more time passed, and Hans, of Namesys, announced that he^Wthey
were adding journalling to reiserfs.  It was all a done in almost no
time at all.

I wasn't following things all that closely.  To my eye, one day reiserfs
went from an overly hyped filesystem, entirely based on B-Trees, to
being the first Linux filesystem with journalling.

To be honest, I was excited about it at the time.  Ext3 was
experimental, as I recall, and had only full data journalling, at a
substantial performance penalty.

The thing is, over time, ext3 evolved, and became performant, and
standard, and really solid.  Tweedie and his team were the tortoise, to
Namesys's hare.

Meanwhile, the cracks started to reveal themselves in reiserfs.

The horror stories of data loss...

They ended up getting mostly resolved, though from what I hear, Suse is
mainly responsible for that.  

These days, Namesys's hype is all about Resiser4.

Resier3 is yesterday!  Reiser4 is tomorrow!!!


Yeah, yeah, yeah...  Some of us remember last time...