Reiser4 Filesystem

Some material is very old and may be incorrect today

© August 2004 Tony Lawrence

Tue Aug 24 21:51:24 2004 Reiser4

At one time, Reiser was poised to replace ext2, but most vendors turned to ext3 instead.

Some of that may have had to do with the murder conviction of Hans Reiser, though some folks still do argue its technical merits.

This post is only of historical interest.

Whether or not you are interested in actually using Reiser4 at this point (it's a back up, reformat as R4, restore thing), you should read the write-up at namesys. The design of this thing is both fascinating and clever: for example, the idea of plugins to handle things like security, special needs, and who knows what else. There are interesting ideas there, like delaying encryption until the block is flushed to disk. And then there's this whole "dancing trees" business, which I may have misunderstood totally, but that sounds to me like a lazy B-Tree - a B-Tree that delays its balancing till a better time.

It's good techy reading and will give you a good idea of what's in store.

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