Debating reiser4 - again [LWN.net]

Debating reiser4 - again

Posted Aug 3, 2006 11:17 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Debating reiser4 - again by ken
Parent article: Debating reiser4 - again

All your points are fallacious.

NTFS inclusion is quite different from reiser4, because NTFS can be read by drivers on other OSes (notably Windows). As such, removal or BROKEN-marking of the NTFS driver was acceptable because users can still reach their data by using the other OS. This is not true of reiser4: once it's in, it can never be removed without essentially vaporizing users' data for them (or at least placing them in a quandary: change your FS (really annoying), don't upgrade and possibly get exposed to security problems, or maintain reiser4 yourself).

As for not merging stuff at the VFS layer, well, if something changes filesystem semantics and is intended for wide use it *must* go into the VFS: only that way can userspace communicate with it, and only that way can other filesystems stand a chance of using whateveritis. Whether it goes in as a library that other filesystems can use (like JBD), or as a change to the VFS layers above the filesystem is a different matter: some stuff (format-changing plugins and so on) can probably be a libfsplugin/, while files-as-directories would require upper-level VFS changes and very possibly changes to glibc (so that apps could tell whether this file can be viewed as a directory without having to regard every file as a directory and breaking all existing code that uses the f_type to determine whether to do an open() or an opendir().)

xattrs, acls, and several other such things have gone into the VFS layer, and IIRC they went in really rather early, when the first internal user went in. You can't really put this stuff off.

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Debating reiser4 - again

Posted Aug 3, 2006 11:55 UTC (Thu) by ken (subscriber, #625) [Link]

Well xatts acls had existed for years on other platforms and had posix documents on how it should work before it was added to linux this was exactly what I meant by proven usefull.

And I really do not see any problem WHATSOEVER of removing reiser4 anythime in the future as long as it has the experimental status.

We have other filesystems that has uniq features like XFS that has a special project quota that does not exist in any other filessytem and nobody has forced them to move it into the common vfs(quota) layer.

But leaving the implementation details aside the standards for reiser4 just looks to be set so much higer than anything else thats whats looks silly to me. And I have read enough about this that no amount of argumeting is going to change my view on that so you can just save yourself some time by not even trying.