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.
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.
Actually read the readme (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Actually read the readme (Score:5, Funny)
I have to say - the previous text read less like a README and more like an Airing of Grievances. I wonder if Hans celebrates Festivus?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Anatoly Pinchuk didn't get a mention either before or after the changes
Re:Actually read the readme (Score:4, Informative)
I was actually already credited. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm... [kernel.org]
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I meant "He" not "I".
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-[...]Mikhail Gilula was a brilliant innovator who also left
-in a destructive way that erased the value of his contributions, and
-that he was shown much generosity just makes it more painful.
+Mikhail Gilula was a brilliant innovator that has shown much generosity.
The sentiments "was shown" and "h
Why would ReiserFS be removed? (Score:4, Insightful)
Presumably nobody is silly enough to conflate the personal failings/successes of developers with technology and innovation that stands on its own merit.
Re:Why would ReiserFS be removed? (Score:4, Informative)
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.)
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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
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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.
Re:Why would ReiserFS be removed? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Why would ReiserFS be removed? (Score:5, Funny)
Why would ReiserFS be removed?
Too much vendor lock-in. ;)
Reiser4 (Score:3)
Re:Reiser4 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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
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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
Re: Reiser4 (Score:1)
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).
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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. /* pid or -pgrp where SIG
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;
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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.
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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
The new commit is incorrect (Score:3)
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.
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The original was a bit shit. Anything, even an inaccurate reading, is a massive improvement.
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See? This is why you guys should let him cook.
These are the people I'm talking about.
Re: Shame (Score:2)
Well there's no issue then it's a shit FS and there's a few less humons
Re: Shame (Score:2)
There are not at all too many people on this planet, based on objective criteria the earth could sustain a decent life for lots more. It's just that a minority of ignorant and/or malevolent knowitalls runs this planet, blaming the problems they and their utterly broken resource allocation schemes cause on the majorities who suffer because of them.
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"Could" and "Should" are not the same things.
Just because "most" people would care about being alive, does not mean they deserve it.
It's clear you both should be in "did not make it" category.
Max I would allow this planet to have is 100M people.
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Max I would allow this planet to have is 100M people.
So your plan is to return the earth to being low-tech garden and wait for a big rock to come and destroy most life on the planet? It's not the worst option, but it is an ultimately self-defeating one.
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How is that low-tech garden? There are maybe 10M tech workers today, of whom 1M actually work in medium to high technology areas.
When do you think we'll be able to 'leave' this planet? 10 years? 50 years? 100 years?
How many people will breed, fight, and die during this time?
There is a difference in living like a virus, and actually trying to be an intelligent, unified species, that maintains equilibrium with its environment.
Re: Shame (Score:2)
"How is that low-tech garden? There are maybe 10M tech workers today"
You are making the mistake we now commonly call "LEARN TO CODE". Specifically, not everyone will ever be a programmer. Two geniuses can breed and create an idiot, let alone a normal person. If you need ten million smart people, you need a billion people or more to have a good chance to have that many.
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You are making a mistake of thinking we are starting off from zero.
This knowledge is already documented, abundantly, ad nauseam.
Today's college kids are dumber than ever, and yet they come out in 4 years being able to fill in junior ranks.
Fast-forward to 5 years and they are at journeyman level.
In a single Blu-Ray disc you can contain all of relevant human knowledge to maintain a comfortable and evolving civilization.
Re: Shame (Score:2)
"In a single Blu-Ray disc you can contain all of relevant human knowledge to maintain a comfortable and evolving civilization."
Not only is this false, what happens when your drive dies?
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I suppose you'll just have to sit in a corner and suck on a thumb.
I have neither the time nor the patience to explain the basics to someone so basic.
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Well, I think everyone would think that the mark of a good filesystem is one that doesn't lose data without knowing about it and informing the user in some way.
So ReiserFS need not apply as a "good" filesystem, especially when there are open implementations of XFS, ZFS, BTRFS, etc. ready to go right now.
Obligatory Wikipedia entry (Score:4, Informative)
Obligatory Wikipedia entry
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Obligatory Wikipedia entry (Score:5, Funny)
I was wondering which article version that was. Thanks for digging that up.
Hans... the man who put "stab" in fstab.
Re: (Score:2)
Hans... the man who put "stab" in fstab.
I thought I was done laughing at Reiser jokes, but nope! Well played.
the actual last request (Score:2)
And here I figured that his last request would be steak, shrimp, curly fries, and ice cream . . . :)
hawk
I'm surprised it was still in the kernel. (Score:3)
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.
Re: I'm surprised it was still in the kernel. (Score:2)
Is there a better alternative to f2fs?
Before f2fs existed I used nilfs2 on random write intolerant media.
You need better editors... (Score:1)
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..."
Re: You need better editors... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: You need better editors... (Score:2)
Yes please. (To the body of your post, not the title.)
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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.
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There
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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
Re: You need better editors... (Score:2)
Not to mention her whirlwind romance with Henry Kissinger.
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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.
"Social mistakes" (Score:2)
"...apologizing for his social mistakes"
Or as the rest of us refer to it, "murder".
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I'll forgive him for using the wrong fork at dinner, but murdering your wife is a wee bit over the line for me.
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Why is he wanting to seen as a better person... is it because his 15 year sentence is almost up?
Re: "Social mistakes" (Score:2)
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?
prison good (Score:2)
Sounds like a lot of developers could benefit from some time in prison.