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On the conviction of Hans ReiserOn the conviction of Hans ReiserPosted Apr 30, 2008 21:12 UTC (Wed) by louie (subscriber, #3285)Parent article: On the conviction of Hans Reiser
It was a radical idea, and, perhaps, impractical. But our future comes from ideas like that. I wish more people grokked that. Then again, I wish more of the people who grok that weren't jerks...
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On the conviction of Hans Reiser Posted May 1, 2008 3:11 UTC (Thu) by walters (subscriber, #7396) [Link] Radical, yes. Useful, largely not. Basically I see little reason for non-POSIX storage systems to live in the kernel. If you want something better and non-POSIX, put your data in SQLite.
On the conviction of Hans Reiser Posted May 1, 2008 3:28 UTC (Thu) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link] Oh, I didn't mean specifically about ReiserFS; I can't really comment on whether or not ReiserFS was really a good idea or not. But much of the response to it on LKML struck me at the time as 'POSIX was good enough for the late 60s, so it is good enough now, and you'll implement it or shut up' rather than a reasoned response to actual flaws in Reiser. It is that kind of uncritical 'this is how we've always done it' thinking that I can't stand, and which, frankly, I think determines a little too much of how most of us (proprietary or open) develop software.
On the conviction of Hans Reiser Posted May 1, 2008 9:15 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link] just out of curiosity: aren't there any advantages to having database-like capabilities in the filesystem layer? Looking at what beagle, strigi and tracker are doing, or even more interesting Nepomuk? I wonder if it would be more efficient to have that stuff in the filesystem like BEOS had?
On the conviction of Hans Reiser Posted May 1, 2008 9:48 UTC (Thu) by MathFox (guest, #6104) [Link] just out of curiosity: aren't there any advantages to having database-like capabilities in the filesystem layer?There are advantages in having search and annotation capabilities in a file system. There are significant disadvantages too. Keeping search indices up to date takes CPU time and memory and requires additional disk access above the ordinary writing of the file. Furthermore the search index eats up disk space. Writing a text file to a "database-like" file system will be slower than writing to an efficient POSIX style file system. The biggest issue there is is that nobody knows what features should be supported by the new file systems... It is very likely that it will be different from POSIX, but the kernel developers don't implement hand-waving. It makes more sense to build some prototype "storage daemons" and demonstration applications to get a feeling about how the interface should look like. It is an interesting research topic, but not ready for a stable production OS yet.
On the conviction of Hans Reiser Posted May 1, 2008 13:23 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link] It makes more sense to build some prototype "storage daemons" and demonstration applications to get a feeling about how the interface should look like. It is an interesting research topic, but not ready for a stable production OS yet. Since you ask: The talk is quite interesting, and he did implement it (albeit as a telnet daemon rather than an actual filesystem). I believe there is an NFS-daemon implementation of this too but I can't find it right at the moment. Rich.
On the conviction of Hans Reiser Posted May 1, 2008 20:07 UTC (Thu) by MenTaLguY (guest, #21879) [Link] There's no need for them to live in the kernel (see also FUSE), but it would sure be nice if there were a little more diverse support from the kernel layer so that non-POSIX things would be a little easier to express through a POSIX-like VFS.
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