I recently watched a video of Hans Reiser’s presentation on ReiserFS, a journalling filesystem. It piqued my curiosity, so I visited the ReiserFS website to read more about the filesystem. I ended up un-learning some things I thought I knew, and had some thoughts to share on ReiserFS in general.
- The Reiser team believes equal access to source code is a civil right. I agree.
- I’ve been using version 3 for a long time. As far as I’m concerned, it’s been the best choice for a journalling filesystem since it was created. I’ve never lost any data whatsoever from a ReiserFS filesystem (though if my hard drive ever truly failed, the filesystem wouldn’t matter). Version 4 is out of the oven now (ok, so I’m a few years behind…), and it looks absolutely amazing. I think I will upgrade going forward.
- The performance enhancements in version 4 are stunning. Consider this: for the first time in history, a compressed filesystem is faster than an uncompressed one. What does that mean? It means the real bottleneck is reading/writing the data on the disk, and the compression and decompression is so fast that it’s less expensive to do a bunch of computation and transfer less data, than to do less computation and transfer more data. That is remarkable.
- ReiserFS is faster, scales better, and is more space-efficient than any other filesystem, according to the benchmarks on their website.
ReiserFS has a lot of implications not only for ordinary file-storage, but for special purpose systems too. It’ll be interesting to see what the next few years bring.
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I’m a little worried about compressed file systems. I just had to grep my hard drive for a file I had deleted minutes after creating it, and that would not have been possible on a compressed file system. On the other hand, it does lend itself to data protection — when you delete your data, it really is pretty much gone.
You said: Consider this: for the first time in history, a compressed filesystem is faster than an uncompressed one. Not entirely true. Way back in time, when using the Mac OS (System 6) with a SCSI disk drive, you could improve read and write times with DiskDoubler turned on. As drive buffers grew, this advantage disappeared. Still, you’ve piqued my interest, I’ll give 4 a try.
I spoke too boldly, Rob! I wasn’t saying that on my own authority; Hans Reiser said it in the video, if I recall correctly. If I’m misquoting him, I apologize for that too. (I don’t have time to view the movie again and see).
I should have said “According to the video…”