Clemens Eisserer wrote: >>AFAIK, the most recent reason why reiser4 does not get included is that >>reiser4 developers have to change reiser4 to use generic code to >>implement read/write. >>AFAICS, reiser4 developers do not work on that. >> >> >Has this really become a reason to not include reiser4 into mainline? > > Yes, this is the official reason.
>I also don't see a reason for that - at least it would bind reiser4 >more close to linux making ports to other OS harder. > > You are entirely correct. It is an interesting social phenomenom that we must do this, yes? Using the ext3 (err, generic) code makes it much harder to license and port reiser4. >Furthermore if it would decrease performance its simply no way to go. > > What we are currently doing is rewriting the reiser4 read and write code to not operate 4k at a time. The design specification was that it was supposed to do as much as possible once per write, and as little as possible every 4k. Unfortunately, when I reviewed our code the design specification had not been adhered to. After the reiser4 code adheres to the reiser4 design specification, it will be possible to argue that the reiser4 design specification is technically superior, and the generic code should change. I generally believe that the per 4k approach used throughout the linux kernel is not as CPU efficient as sending larger groups of pages through the layers all at once. In other words, there is a reason we have bios, and we need to learn the lesson from them that they teach us, and abstract it into a general design approach. We must make reiser4 adhere to the reiser4 design specification before we can deal with their demand that we change the generic code so that it does what reiser4 does. I have no desire to touch their code, but they require it. Generally speaking, they don't really like any feature existing in reiser4 that is not in their code, and ask that we add it to their code before reiser4 is allowed to have it. They call the ext3 code the "generic" code. They claim that if we don't use the ext3 code in our fs then they will be forced to shoulder an extra burden to maintain our code. We are not allowed to specify that they should not maintain our code at all. I need to read more Kafka I think, it is hard for me to understand it all. >(btw. I think this could be a way to generate some revenue - I think >there is demand for a modern fs which is supported by both, windows >and linux). > > There are so many ways to generate revenue by spending revenue I don't have in my pocket right now..... forgive me, yes, someday we should do that and will do that. >lg Clemens > > > > If any of you users want to see a reiser4, you have to strenuously clamor for it to go into mainline, or you simply will not get it. Namesys cannot survive indefinitely with it not going into the kernel. This is a political issue, and viewing it as otherwise is simply naive. It is sad, I chose Linux over BSD to develop for because BSD used to be like this. Hans
