From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932568AbVISSvG (ORCPT ); Mon, 19 Sep 2005 14:51:06 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932569AbVISSvG (ORCPT ); Mon, 19 Sep 2005 14:51:06 -0400 Received: from rwcrmhc12.comcast.net ([204.127.198.43]:23551 "EHLO rwcrmhc12.comcast.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932568AbVISSvF (ORCPT ); Mon, 19 Sep 2005 14:51:05 -0400 Message-ID: <432F0890.7060802@namesys.com> Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 11:50:56 -0700 From: Hans Reiser User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041217 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Alan Cox CC: thenewme91@gmail.com, Christoph Hellwig , Denis Vlasenko , chriswhite@gentoo.org, LKML , ReiserFS List Subject: Re: I request inclusion of reiser4 in the mainline kernel References: <432AFB44.9060707@namesys.com> <200509171415.50454.vda@ilport.com.ua> <200509180934.50789.chriswhite@gentoo.org> <200509181321.23211.vda@ilport.com.ua> <20050918102658.GB22210@infradead.org> <1127079524.8932.21.camel@localhost.localdomain> <432E4786.7010001@namesys.com> <1127126616.22124.7.camel@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <1127126616.22124.7.camel@localhost.localdomain> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.90.1.0 X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Alan Cox wrote: >On Sul, 2005-09-18 at 22:07 -0700, Hans Reiser wrote: > > >>>the ability to fix some of those bugs fast, but we also all remember >>>what happened with reiser3 later on despite early fast fixing. >>> >>> >>> >>> >>What was that? >> >> > >Jeff Mahoney added file attributes to reiserfs3, you whined and pointed >people at the yet to be released reiserfs4. > If you benchmarked that code, you might understand why I "whined." You can't just create a file per directory and stuff the attributes in it and expect good performance. Let's not forget that there was no documentation, no design document, no design review, no QA process. It is always a judgment call to decide what should be deferred to the next major release and what should go into a stable branch. File attributes are a significant portion of the bugs that V3 has had. File attributes got added so that a marketer would have a bullet point added, which can be very important and I am genuinely eager to work hard to make marketers happy, but to the extent I get to decide, it will never happen at the cost of coding it the wrong way. Jeff is a great guy, and his bitmap related code is great stuff with good design and solid empirical work behind it. You have to really understand the difference between V3 and V4 to appreciate that it was not feasible for him to code xattrs for V3 the right way, because it would be a disk format change and a nightmare to do it. The code was doomed by V3's lack of plugins before it was even written. There is a reason why V4 came into being.... If added to V4, xattrs would be higher performance and cleaner to implement. It would be far better to have spent the programming effort on adding them to V4 and getting V4 out a little sooner. I won't convince you of this one but it is also my reason: They are inelegant semantics. I don't remember the details of the 4k stack and journaling issues you describe, so I will say nothing.