Getting a rise out of Reiser4

Getting a rise out of Reiser4.

Last time I looked at ReiserFS was, I think, at
least couple of years ago. It was a nice file system but I didn't
find any use for it. Two years later, Reiser4 is released and I still can't
find a good use for it, but it sure has some intriguing one liner feature list
that would any geek a bit of excitement:

  • Reiser4 is the fastest filesystem, and
    here are the benchmarks.
  • Reiser4 is an atomic filesystem, which means that your filesystem
    operations either entirely occur, or they entirely don't, and they don't corrupt due
    to half occuring. We do this without significant performance losses, because we invented
    algorithms to do it without copying the data twice.
  • Reiser4 uses dancing trees, which obsolete the balanced tree algorithms
    used in databases (see farther down). This makes Reiser4 more space efficient than
    other filesystems because we squish small files together rather than wasting space
    due to block alignment like they do. It also means that Reiser4 scales better than
    any other filesystem. Do you want a million files in a directory, and want to create
    them fast? No problem.
  • Reiser4 is based on plugins, which means that it will attract many outside contributors,
    and you'll be able to upgrade to their innovations without reformatting your disk.
    If you like to code, you'll really like plugins….
  • Reiser4 is architected for military grade security. You'll find it
    is easy to audit the code, and that assertions guard the entrance to every function.

Dancing trees? I gotta look into that algorithm sometimes. I wonder if
variations of the algorithms will be called Disco or Samba? 😉 Hmm.
One of the testimonials is LivingXML which is a native XML engine built-on top of
Reiser. That's nice except LivingXML seems
to be, well, dead. Oh, well.  [Don Park's Daily Habit]

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