On reiserfs and external attributes [LWN.net]

On reiserfs and external attributes

Posted Apr 29, 2004 13:47 UTC (Thu) by jeremiah (subscriber, #1221)
In reply to: On reiserfs and external attributes by dlang
Parent article: On reiserfs and external attributes

If I'm not mistaken, didn't Hans stir things up when he first came out with riserfs and tried to get it included in the kernel. Sort of upseting a lot of people. He's like the RMS of filesystems. Briliant, but inflexible.

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On reiserfs and external attributes

Posted Apr 29, 2004 19:17 UTC (Thu) by erwbgy (subscriber, #4104) [Link] (1 responses)

That's hardly fair. Here is an excerpt from what he said [1]:

"Not sure you want to ship a 3.0 without it. It is 50-150% faster than
V3, which makes it a significant competitive advantage. I forget how
much faster writes are, something well over 100% faster, and the newest
version is faster yet.

How do I put it. I'm the last straggler coming back from the hunt, and
I've got what looks like it might be a wooly mammoth on my shoulders,
and my tribesmen are complaining that I'm late for dinner. How about
helping me by cutting down a tree for the roasting spit instead? Think
thoughts of the poor hungry Microsoft tribe eating NTFS.
...
Oh, and it has features too, not just performance..."

Yes, there was lengthy discussion and some disagreement about including
Reiser4 in the 2.6 kernel (which some thought would be 3.0), but it was
not an unreasonable request, and eventually got included on merit.

I've always liked that "straggler coming back from the hunt" metaphor :-)

[1] http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0210.3/0603.html

On reiserfs and external attributes

Posted May 24, 2004 21:40 UTC (Mon) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Ouch. You can't have a more than 100% faster write -- it would complete before it's issued. ;-) (Yeah, I know, he probably meant >50%, i.e. that v3 is 100% slower than v4. I freely admit that nitpicking is fun.)

That being said, most programs could care less about which file system they're running on. Thus, uniformity of features is somewhat more important than purity.