Reiser4 is released and is said to be the fastest filesystem: It is an atomic filesystem, it uses dancing trees, it is based on plugins and is architected for military grade security.
Reiser4 is released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
wonder when slack will include it in the current tree 😀 (my only used distro)
Well, I guess after it has been integrated in kernel 2.6.x PV will add it to testing/ (when upgrading it to a new kernel).
Now I only have to wait for it to mature a little. Come on all you early adopters, work out all those bugs for me!
I hope its as good as its been sounding.
I really need basic encryption and filesystem compression on linux. I hope i wont have to wait too long anymore 🙂
This is great news, i cant wait to test the supposed speed increase of this
Combined with my gentoo install it should rocket
many people i speak to who consider resierfs also consider xfs (and end up using xfs). the namesys website does have a benchmarks page but only compares with ext fs, not others.
i wonder if anyone can compare resierfs4 with xfs?
Really released? Did the two years already left behind? 😉
When is the next release of Linspire? It should have it.
Also SUSE when will they release their next version with R4.
Both of these are already available on Linux for any filesystem. For example, it’s possible to create an encrypted loop-back file-system on Linux – I setup a /home.crypt folder to match /home and wrote a small app to mount it. See this page for more http://bob.plankers.com/other/linux/loopback_efs.html
Likewise with compression. You can create a ZIP archive of a folder with a KDE service menu, and then add and remove files to it like you would normally. It’s the same as offered by Windows.
On the kernel side there’s the like of cramfs, but that’s only for extreme circumstances.
NTFS also has filesystem-level compression, completely transparent to user programs.
I would like to know if is possible to convert current ReiserFS partition to Reiser4. I can’t find a specific guide about this…:-(
No, there’s no such a tool yet. You have to backup your data and format your partition.
You may want to read Hans Reiser’s comments on Slashdot for more information (not limited to conversion): http://slashdot.org/~hansreiser
I wonder how well this will run on top of LVM2. And if it has a partion rezieing tools for whenn you increase the size of the Logical Volume.
> I wonder how well this will run on top of LVM2
No problem at all, it will run on a lvm2 volume just as on a conventional partition (On a test machine I currently run reiser4 on top of lvm2 on volumes in lvm1 metadata format).
> And if it has a partion rezieing tools for whenn you
> increase the size of the Logical Volume.
reiser4progs contains resizefs.reiser4 which does what you want. But I haven’t tried it yet.
R4 is not recommended for production use, so why would you want that in Linspire, Suse, or whatever, for that matter. Go download + install yourself today, if you feel like tempering with it.
“When is the next release of Linspire? It should have it.
Also SUSE when will they release their next version with R4.”
Linspire won’t tell, but I suspect they want those boxes out before Christmas, at least. I think they mean to include it in 5.0 .
I expect SuSe 9.2 will be out around May, with a good chance of Reiser4 being included as an ‘option’ (e.g. I think they will still stick to Reiser V3 as the ‘standard’)
Those are just my guesses.
@By Anonymous (IP: —.dip.t-dialin.net)
I thought by releasing R4 that it was stable.
@ By Anonymous (IP: —.iFiber.telenet-ops.be)
Thanks for the reply.
I know, but I dont like the loop-back solution and I want compression ON FILESYSTEM LEVEL (like for all of / ). This is to my knowledge only possible with REISER4.
Cheers
Some one tell to the FEDORA team to start supporting Reiser.
Ext3 filesystem is old fashioned.
A good comparison can be found here:
http://fsbench.netnation.com/
It is a little old (before 2.6.1 release) but still could give you an idea. Remember: Reiser4 has evolved since then!
Thank you, Ced…:-)
Awesome, I’m going to try this out sometime soon. Hrmm. I’m going to find a way to make resierfsv4 run on my / partition. I will find a way! Most likely will include a hybrid of doing a linux from scratch and just using this reiserfs4. Or using a bootable cd like Knoppix, which I think v3.6 was released yesterday, and building off that on to the main partition. Hrmm.
Exists a “tune2fs” to reiser4?
I need remake the file system?
I just converted my / ext3 to reiser4, little tricky but doable.
No problems so far, I think I even noticed some speedup on gnome (menu opening). But maybe I’m just biased , been waiting for this a longtime.
BTW Debian Unstable has the reiser4 patches, so building a custom kernelpackage is relatively easy.
Some one tell to the FEDORA team to start supporting Reiser. –
—
redhat and fedora supports reiserfs for a long time
just pass
“linux reiserfs”
during installation
I thought by releasing R4 that it was stable.
—
stable doesnt mean production ready right now. better wait to see or just use it for testing till you are sure
When I was testing rs4 about a month ago, the resize is a tool, but doesn’t WORK, (so its a real TOOL) Hans wants money in order to build that funconality.
That might have changed now, but just be warned that it “MIGHT” not work.
It’s super fast, but will it refrain from turning my data into garbage?
That remains to be seen.
I wonder if that’s the grade security that (up until this year), the Navy base down the road allowed telnet, ftp, Oracle and other connections to their servers from the public internet.
I’ve been running Reiser4 since last year. I’ve had a few problems with it in the past, but no problems lately.
It is very fast. Although part of that might be the pair of X15.3 SCSI drives in RAID 0 that I run it on…
keep in mind that some fs can kill your CPU, if you have a slower processor, the “fancy” FS will be worst!
> redhat and fedora supports reiserfs for a long time
More or less. There is the hidden reiserfs option but I can hardly call this support, especially since Fedora’s installer doesn’t support reiserfs on lvm volumes and I heard that raid arrays will not allow reiserfs on them too.
Not to mention that they ship their kernel with unfixed reiserfs issues although patches exist (I cannot confirm this but at least Hans Reiser wrote about this on slashdot, I don’t know if the situation has changed in the latest Fedora kernel).
Because I use lvm very often Fedora is a no-go for me because their reiserfs support is just crippled.
“now call me old fashioned, but I’ve heard of red/black trees, but what the fuck are dancing trees?”
I would assume it has some relation to Knuth’s dancing links. I’m no expert on it, but I think his was a way for efficient backtracking in linked lists.
WRONG! 8)
I have an FC2 box w/ LVM2 running at home.
:unsure: but it appears to work for me, so you should try b4 you say it is crippled/doesn’t work.
Deal?
😉
Dancing trees are a variation of the tree algorithms used in databases and other filesystems (eg: B-trees and B+-trees). There is an explanation of them in the excellent Reiser4 whitepaper:
http://namesys.com/v4/v4.html
Go to section 4: “Tree Design Concepts.”
It’s the file system for all the druids out there…
😉
The subject says it all!
Anybody who have any idea if it will work together with SELinux?
…diggin’ the dancing trees!
(ahem) sorry. The technical details of everything R4 related are explained in depth on the namesys page but be warned – the images provided to aid understanding are overtly drug influenced. Don’t blame me if you “freak out”.
…having the time of your life
F/OSS stimulates creativity! If you want proof:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=121752
ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/songs/
http://www.revolution-os.com/Free_Software_Song_video.mpg
Far better tha FUD!
Interesting.
I do not know that much about Reiser4, so could someone tell me if you install a Reiser4 file system on a SuSe distro, why does the stock kernels fail too load off of Kernel.org?
I think it has to do with the extended attributes of the file system. However, I enable ACL’s on ext3 with a normal install of SuSe then I can load stock kernels and build in my modifications for my customers.
Anyone know what the procedure is to pull a stock kernel off of kernel.org and install it on a Reiser4 file system on a SuSe machine?
Could apply to Fedora, but I have been a ext3 snob for quite awhile now and haven’t experimented with anything else.
-gc
at least if it does end up turning your data into garbage it will do it really fast.
I think all these filesystems are cool. Except maybe JFS. JFS scares me.
” I do not know that much about Reiser4, so could someone tell me if you install a Reiser4 file system on a SuSe distro, why does the stock kernels fail too load off of Kernel.org?”
You may have to make an initrd with the reiser4 module in it, or compile it into the kernel. If resier4 is a module rather than compiled staticly into the kernel, it gets into a ‘can’t read the filesystem to get the module that is needed to read the filesystem’ catch 22.
RE: SELinux
I’d be interested to know this myself. As far as I can work out, someone posted patches for resiser3 for extended attributes, they were rejected, reiser came up with a new attributes system for v4 that is wonderful but incompatible with the kernel api used for se attributes right now, but somehow it works.. It’s all a bit confusing.
how do you enable reiser4 in mm sources? All i see in file systems is ReiserFS, which when compiled, only seems to give me reiser3.
You have to disable 4k stack size. Reiser4 only works with 8k stack. Them, Reiser4 appear on menu.
I hope Hans & crew fix that. 4K stacks is an improvement for many work loads.
unless it was a joke, my KANOTIX upgraded itself from 3 to 4 during my last apt-get dist-upgrade because it is part of unstable, on my other box and it seems fine
redhat and fedora supports reiserfs for a long time
just pass
“linux reiserfs”
during installation
I wish that were true, however, I’ve tried it, and got nothing but trouble when running Fedora’s built in apps; yes, even after running yum and updating the system. There seems to be incompatilities between reiserfs and how Fedora does things; btw, I’ve noticed the same problems when I was running Red Hat 9.