Mike Benoit wrote:
Could you not also write a small little app that gathers all kinds of
stats about a file system and sends it to a Namesys server in hopes of
finding better statistical data? I'm sure there are thousands of users
Assuming the results are all made available, essentially public domain.
If it becomes "improve Reiser" instead of "improve filesystems", then
only fans of Reiser will do it.
A much better approach in my opinion would be to have Reiser4 perform
well in the majority of cases without the repacker, and sell the
repacker to peopleisn' something who need that extra bit of performance. If
I'm not
mistaken this is actually Hans intent.
Hans?
Yes, that's the idea. Only sysadmins of large corps are likely to buy.
We throw in service and support as well for those who purchase it.
Personally, as much as I would like it all to be free, I think I would
be much more willing to pay for compression/encryption (on both servers
and desktops) then I would be for a repacker. Hard disks cost money, and
if I can compress the vast majority of my data and save on purchasing a
new hard disk, that is well worth it. I also have some important data
that I would really like to encrypt, which is also worth spending money
on. But gaining ~10% in performance probably isn't worthwhile spending
money on as I most likely wouldn't notice a difference in my day to day
life, unless my server was incredibly busy.
Assuming the performance gain is only 10%, you may be right. Still,
faster disks, controllers, buses, and CPUs also cost money.
I would be willing to pay for both, even, if the price was reasonable (I
think there was a scheme based on amount of space placed under the FS?),
and if I could be guaranteed updates (bug fixes, new kernels, etc) for
at least the functionality that I've paid for, with no additional cost.
Reiser4 lazy writes make a huge difference on a laptop, and my current
laptop is a Mac. That means that around when the next Mac OS rolls out,
it will be perfectly reasonable to spend some $50 or $100 to make my
Linux faster instead of my Mac OS, especially since I'm trying to
migrate off of Mac OS as much as possible. (I miss package management.)
One more suggestion: Maybe make it free for non-commercial use only?
And by that I mean, based on how the FS is actually being used. I don't
know if piracy is or has been a problem for Namesys, but at least the
economics of it makes sense: A fifteen year old hacker won't want to
pay for an FS, but might have a lot to contribute. But if your main
market is large servers, have those people pay -- they are running their
business off your FS.
There is no doubt there is a market for a repacker, but I think people
are much more likely to spend money on something that is immediately
tangible, like disk space instantly being free'd up by compression, or
data instantly being encrypted. As compared to something that is much
The compression will probably mostly be about speed. Remember, if we're
talking about people who want to see tangible, visceral results, we're
probably also talking about end-users. And trust me, the vast majority
of most of my data (as an end-user) is not very compressible.
Ok, I lied: I love games, and you can make a very modern-looking game
in 96K:
http://produkkt.abraxas-medien.de/kkrieger
But while that could be seen as a kind of compression, it's done by
hand, and is fairly irrelevant to filesystems.
No, mostly we're talking about things like office documents, the
majority of which fit in less than a gigabyte, and multimedia (music,
movies, games) which will gain very little from compression. If
anything, the benefit would be mostly in compressing software.
less tangible like fragmentation percentages and minor I/O throughput
improvements. I used to work at a large, world wide web hosting company
and I could see making a case to management for purchasing Reiser4
compression would be pretty easy for our shared servers. Instantly
freeing up large amounts of disk space (where .html/.php files were the
vast majority) would save huge amounts of money on disk drives,
especially since most of the servers used RAID1 and adding new drives
was a huge pain in the neck. Making a case to purchase a repacker would
be much, much more difficult.
Hmm, the problem is, if storage space is really the big deal, it's been
done before, and some of these efforts are still usable and free:
http://parallel.vub.ac.be/~johan/compFUSEd/
http://www.miio.net/fusecompress/
http://north.one.pl/~kazik/pub/LZOlayer/
http://apfs.humorgraficojr.com/apfs_ingles.html
And while we're on the topic, here's an FS that does unpacking of
archives, probably about the same way we imagined it in Reiser4
pseudofiles/magic:
http://www.nongnu.org/unpackfs/
But regardless, as far as I can tell, the only real, tangible benefit of
using Reiser4 compression instead of one of those four FUSE filesystems
is speed. Reiser4 would compress/decompress when actually hitting the
disk, not just the FS, and it would also probably use in-kernel
compression, rather than calling out to userspace on every FS operation.
But you see, if you're talking about speed, 10% is a respectably big
improvement, so I could see selling them on a repacker at the same time.
Maybe bundles are a good idea...
Maybe there should be a Reiser4 Whitepaper Value Pack, once everything
on the whitepaper is done?
See, customers who used lots of CPU were easy to up-sell to a dedicated
server because page load times were tangible and if they didn't move we
would be forced to shut them off. However customers who used gobs of
disk space were much more difficult to up-sell to dedicated servers
because it didn't affect themselves or other customers in a tangible
way. They wouldn't notice any difference by moving to a much more
expensive dedicated server.
Sounds like more a marketing problem than a technical one. Couldn't you
just charge more on the virtual server? Or start charging by the megabyte?
I would like to see Namesys succeed and become incredibly profitable for
Hans, if nothing else for the fact that he has given a huge amount to
the open source community already. A profitable Namesys only means we'll
have a greater chance of seeing even more interesting stuff from them in
the future.
Amen.
