Personal thoughts of Reiser 4 and the Kernel [LWN.net]

Personal thoughts of Reiser 4 and the Kernel

Posted Jun 8, 2006 2:52 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648)
Parent article: What's not going into 2.6.18

I think it's sad that the Reiser 4 FS code continues to sit and simmer. Granted, I realize how much difficulty Hans', Vladimir Savelijev's, and the fellow Reiser 4 developers' code has given the Kernel developers - I do respect the developers' high standards - but I also agree with Andrew that it can't sit much longer.

Does this whole debate (going on since 2003?) about Reiser 4 and the Linux Kernel truly espouse the philosophies of open source? Or, am I blind to part of this debate?

Thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts.

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Personal thoughts of Reiser 4 and the Kernel

Posted Jun 8, 2006 5:09 UTC (Thu) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link]

Unfortunately I think Reiser4 has been held back by a bit of politics on
both sides. My observation is that Hans and his team are brilliant, and so
are many of the kernel people that object, and since there has been heat
in the past, well - you probably get where I'm going with this.

I wonder what the remaining complaints are at this point. If it's just
stylistic I'd say that it's silly to keep it out as it's a filesystem (not
a piece of core code). If people aren't getting hit with panics or data
munching bugs, and the code is reasonably good, why has it been held up
for _so_ long?

Personal thoughts of Reiser 4 and the Kernel

Posted Jun 8, 2006 7:39 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link]

If it's just stylistic I'd say that it's silly to keep it out as it's a filesystem (not a piece of core code).

Wasn't one of the gripes that it touches major pieces of the core VFS, not just it's own? If it's still so, I can see a VERY good reason to be perfectionist about this.

It's quite a while since I followed the discussion though, so they might already have been forced to pull the VFS parts out.

Personal thoughts of Reiser 4 and the Kernel

Posted Jun 8, 2006 9:11 UTC (Thu) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link]

I think you may be misremembering this a bit. To my recollection, one of
the key friction points was that reiser4 developed this whole new concept
of plugins, which was _very_ similar to the VFS. Kernel developers don't
want abstraction layers hanging off of abstraction layers. So it really
wasn't that they were abusing the VFS, it was just that they were building
their own VFS under the VFS.

It was suggested that they take the differences in their plugin system and
build those capabilities into the VFS itself, so that it would be
available to every filesystem.

I'm not sure what the status of the code is these days. I would imagine
that enough time has gone by that many of these things have been
addressed, and reiser4 is probably a lot closer to being ready for
mainline (if it isn't already).

Personal thoughts of Reiser 4 and the Kernel

Posted Jun 8, 2006 17:08 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link]

*plonk*

Yep, it was that way around! :)