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Linux 6.10 Honors One Last Request By Hans Reiser (phoronix.com) 71

Longtime Slashdot reader DVega shares a report from Phoronix: ReiserFS lead developer and convicted murderer Hans Reiser a few months back wrote letters to be made public apologizing for his social mistakes and other commentary. In his written communications he also made a last request for ReiserFS in the Linux kernel: "Assuming that the decision is to remove [ReiserFS] V3 from the kernel, I have just one request: that for one last release the README be edited to add Mikhail Gilula, Konstantin Shvachko, and Anatoly Pinchuk to the credits, and to delete anything in there I might have said about why they were not credited. It is time to let go."

Hans credits his improved social and communication skills learned in prison among other details shared in the public letters. Per the indirect request by Hans Reiser, SUSE's Jan Kara has now altered the ReiserFS README file with the changes going in today to the Linux 6.10 kernel. The negative language was removed and instead acknowledging their contributions.

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Linux 6.10 Honors One Last Request By Hans Reiser

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  • by paxmees ( 5484586 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @06:39PM (#64489033)
  • by Shaitan ( 22585 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @06:51PM (#64489049)

    Presumably nobody is silly enough to conflate the personal failings/successes of developers with technology and innovation that stands on its own merit.

    • by ljw1004 ( 764174 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @07:10PM (#64489079)

      Why would ReiserFS be removed? Presumably nobody is silly enough to conflate the personal failings/successes of developers with technology and innovation that stands on its own merit.

      Here's why it's being removed: https://letmegooglethat.com/?q... [letmegooglethat.com]

      (No need for presumptions, and no need for you to allude to silliness in anyone else.)

      • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        Yes I could go for a random search result and scroll through a bunch of whatever turns up OR I could post the question here where I'm used to getting insight from developers like Alan Cox, Linus Torvalds, etc. And the potential for silliness is hardly off the table given what happened to Linus himself.

        I haven't been watching the kernel as closely lately but scanning results it would appear that Reiser4 was indeed potentially blacklisted due to silliness, though officially for a lack of corporate sponsor [si

        • Yes I could go for a random search result and scroll through a bunch of whatever turns up OR I could post the question here where I'm used to getting insight from developers like Alan Cox, Linus Torvalds, etc.

          The second search result in the list for me is literally from Hans Reiser.

    • by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @07:28PM (#64489099) Homepage Journal

      Usually the kernel interfaces are changing and nobody feels like maintaining the code.

      Usually because no one is using it.

      Some exceptions exist like Itanium but then a market player picks up the ball.

      For a news spool or something like that which ReiserFS used to handle, today most people would use a JFS or ZFS with small files in a special device on a fast disk, compressed too.

      Nobody really uses ufs or fat16 or ext2 outside of very niche cases anymore which is just fine. An old livecd will be usable for archaeology for a long time.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @10:42PM (#64489389)

      Why would ReiserFS be removed?

      Too much vendor lock-in. ;)

  • by Wonko the Sane ( 25252 ) * on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @07:15PM (#64489081) Journal
    It's too bad we never got to see the vision of unified metadata / file-as-directory that was supposed to ship in Reiser4 but never did come to fruition.
    • Re:Reiser4 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @08:58PM (#64489233) Homepage Journal

      It's pretty easy to store metadata about files, so if there were staggering demand for it you'd think someone would have done it by now. For example, you could use a secondary filesystem with metadata files named the same as your source files so that you could guarantee that you could support all of the same filenames, easy peasy. Or obviously, you could stuff them into a RDBMS, no a nosql db, or anything in between, with a caching layer to prevent thrashing. But where is the demand? As filesystems get faster, and files get more useful formats which reduce the I/O necessary to determine a file's characteristics, there's less and less benefit to it. Your management application can store your metadata.

      Reiserfs had a reputation for losing data, and for significantly better performance only for certain workloads which weren't that relevant to most use cases (mostly for lots of small files that you were reading and writing often — performance for that is now typically solved with more RAM) so I don't quite comprehend the nostalgia.

      • The demand is there, the issue is that it simply isn't as easy as people thought. There's been several attempts at making them and they have all been some variation of flakey, almost volatile, and slow as molasses. I'm reminded of WinFS. That actually made it into a Vista beta, and the general consensus was the idea was great but it rendered the system completely unusable.

        You can see the demand being there by the number of tools we have that throw metadata on top of files, or store metadata about files sepa

        • There's been several attempts at making them and they have all been some variation of flakey, almost volatile, and slow as molasses.

          The problem is, you have to be able to store arbitrary data about files. Well, we have a system that can store arbitrary data, it's called a filesystem. People forget that it used to be SOP to have the OS handle file structure for you. When we stopped doing that the computer became more useful, not less so, because you didn't have to update the OS in order to have new kinds of applications. Application logic belongs, you know, in applications. When you try to make the OS' metadata functionality useful to ev

      • If you stuff them in a database that means (at least) two reads per file from disk, once for the metadata and once for the data. You cannot have references to all your data in memory, that is why deduplication systems (eg in ZFS) are so memory hungry.

        ZFS can do metadata caching on separate disks but this is only useful when you have lots of slow spinning disks and proportionally very fast metadata disks and you often need the metadata apart from the files (eg backup sets).

        • That's not true, because you don't always want the file and you don't always want the metadata.
          • by guruevi ( 827432 )

            In most cases you get both whether you need them or not, unless you have an already open file handle.

            From the Linux kernel: each open file, socket etcetera is represented by a file data structure.
            struct file {
            mode_t f_mode;
            loff_t f_pos;
            unsigned short f_flags;
            unsigned short f_count;
            unsigned long f_reada, f_ramax, f_raend, f_ralen, f_rawin;
            struct file *f_next, *f_prev;
            int f_owner; /* pid or -pgrp where SIG

            • If you're not actually reading the file, and you only want the filesystem metadata, then you can easily just not read any of it. In that case you're being offered the file, but you're not taking it.

              You always get the filesystem metadata, but you don't always get the file.

              If you don't get at least part of the file, though, you're probably not getting all of the file's metadata. Except in the case of raw file formats, there's usually a header and/or footer of some sort, or a container, etc etc.

              • The whole point of having a meta-data store is to *not* have that data in headers but instead to have it stored in a generic way that the OS understands.
            • That's not the type of meta-data that is being talked about here, I don't believe. What they are talking about is something along the lines of the MacOS resource fork. What you are showing is the file system meta-data not the file meta-data. The resource fork includes things like "Created By: Adobe Acrobat"
              • by guruevi ( 827432 )

                The MacOS resource fork is rather outdated (I believe it was last actively used in MacOS 9). It has some great uses (you can reference a file regardless of where it moved in the tree by leaving behind the resource fork) but it suffers from the same problem (being a separate file) so lots of things never supported it (eg. zip utilities). You can find similar 'solutions' in NTFS, these days they are just extended attributes specific to the filesystem and stored in the same structure.

                Reiser had/has some great

  • by XanC ( 644172 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @07:21PM (#64489091)

    Mikhail Gilula was described as having been shown much generosity in the original, and now it says he showed much generosity. It looks like the updater tried to cull the original text for anything positive and trim out everything else, which is a fine approach in this situation, but misread the sense of the original in this case.

  • by kriston ( 7886 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @10:33PM (#64489363) Homepage Journal

    Obligatory Wikipedia entry

    https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind... [wikipedia.org]

  • by kiore ( 734594 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @12:06AM (#64489489) Homepage Journal

    It seems it isn't maintained, doesn't support quotas & hasn't been fixed for the 2038 problem.

    Yes, it was good 20 years ago, but time has moved on.

  • Quote: "ReiserFS lead developer and convicted murderer Hans Reiser..."

    Well... let's copy this style of "news":

    "Pacifist leader and pederast, extreme racist Gandhi..."

    "Saint and sadist Mother Teresa of Calcutta..."

    "Pope and murderer Paul IV..."

    • "If a man builds a thousand bridges and sucks one dick, they don't call him a bridge-builder... they call him a cocksucker. "
    • Yes please. (To the body of your post, not the title.)

    • Well... let's copy this style of "news":

      I mean, yes? Let's absolutely do that.

      Ma Theresa was a piece of shit in particular, her organization drew in funds that could have gone to organizations that didn't celebrate suffering.

      • Have you visited any of her sites? Compared the level of care and dignity they provide with the alternatives? If you have I don't see how you could be anti Mother Theresa. There is an argument of Charity vs Justice to be made. But Honestly both are needed. Where is there complete Justice on this earth? I've never seen it. Waiting for it seems like cruelty. Charity without trying to get Justice also seems cruel. Call out our terribleness towards each other. Try to make us treat others with more dignity.

        There
        • LOL

          Quote: "Have you visited any of her sites? Compared the level of care and dignity they provide with the alternatives?"

          I need NOT to visit her torture chambers AT ALL. Why? Because painkillers are a BASIC treatment done BY EVERYONE... well, everyone BUT HER.

          She DENIED ANY PAINKILLER to her "patients" because (literal quote) "pain puts you closer to God".

          Heck, there's even a video recording while she was been interviewed in one of her torture chambers where a patient goes to her and said "Please, make God

        • See sibling comment, then reread mine in that context. If you still don't understand, then I don't really have anything else to try to convince you with. You either care about easily and cheaply alleviated human suffering or you don't.

  • "...apologizing for his social mistakes"

    Or as the rest of us refer to it, "murder".

    • I think in this case "social mistakes" actually means socially being an asshole to everyone, as in, he had a reputation for being an asshole even before being a convicted murderer.
    • Why is he wanting to seen as a better person... is it because his 15 year sentence is almost up?

      • He lied about his wife's disappearance and used the autism defense that he was just too damn smart to have killed her and left so much incriminating evidence and therefore is innocent, just weird.

        Well, at least up until he was convicted and could get a few years off his sentence, at which point he remembered he had done it after all and led authorities to her remains.

        Are you suggesting such a person might have ulterior motives in exhibiting good behavior?

  • Sounds like a lot of developers could benefit from some time in prison.

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