Alexey Dobriyan wrote: > Reiser4 developers, Andrew, > > The patch below is so-called reiser4 LZO compression plugin as extracted > from 2.6.18-rc4-mm3. > > I think it is an unauditable piece of shit and thus should not enter > mainline. > > Hmm. LZO is the best compression algorithm for the task as measured by the objectives of good compression effectiveness while still having very low CPU usage (the best of those written and GPL'd, there is a slightly better one which is proprietary and uses more CPU, LZRW if I remember right. The gzip code base uses too much CPU, though I think Edward made an option of it....). Could you be kind enough to send me a plugin which is better at those two measures, I'd be quite grateful?
By the way, could you tell me about this "auditing" stuff? Last I remember, when I mentioned that the US Defense community had coding practices worth adopting by the Kernel Community, I was pretty much disregarded. So, while I understand that the FSB has serious security issues what with all these Americans seeking to crack their Linux boxen, complaining to me about auditability seems a bit graceless.;-) Especially if there is no offer of replacement compression code. Oh, and this LZO code is not written by Namesys. You can tell by the utter lack of comments, assertions, etc. We are just seeking to reuse well known widely used code. I have in the past been capable of demanding that my programmers comment code not written by them before we use it, but this time I did not. I have mixed feeling about us adding our comments to code written by a compression specialist. If Andrew wants us to write our own compression code, or comment this code and fill it with asserts, we will grumble a bit and do it. It is not a task I am eager for, as compression code is a highly competitive field which gives me the surface impression that if you are not gripped by what you are sure is an inspiration you should stay out of it. Jorn wrote: I've had an identical argument with Linus about lib/zlib_*. He decided that he didn't care about diverging, I went ahead and changed the code. In the process, I merged a couple of outstanding bugfixes and reduced memory consumption by 25%. Looks like Linus was right on that one. Anyone sends myself or Edward a patch, that's great. Jorn, sounds like you did a good job on that one. Hans