Re: reiser4?

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Re: reiser4?
by Simon Edwards on Wednesday 23/Feb/2005, @14:15

> trivial example: how would you store a personal annotation of a web
> page in a filesystem based approach?

The direction that Reiser is heading is towards a general filesystem/retrival system. Kind of a mix of a traditional filesystem plus a database, while being very flexible and 'plastic' (i.e. you wouldn't have to define a fixed schema before you could use it). Searching using partial chunks of info being a big part it. Basically you could build and search almost arbitrary data-structures (on disk). A traditional Unix style filesystem is just one thing that you could make using this kind of system, but much more would be possible.

Read, (and try to get your head around, it's hard!), the Future Vision paper at:
http://www.namesys.com/

--
Simon

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Re: reiser4?
by Aaron J. Seigo on Wednesday 23/Feb/2005, @15:35

> The direction that Reiser is heading is towards a general
> filesystem/retrival system

yes, it's a very interesting and ambitious goal, one Oracle failed at in the 90s, though for market reasons rather than technical ones.

> Basically you could build and search almost arbitrary
> data-structures (on disk)

of course, and we're using an RDBMS to do exactly that at the moment. the reason that a file system doesn't offer anything (featurewise) above what the RDBMS does to make it more attractive is that not everything in the necessary "arbitrary data structures" refer/link to things that are local or even storable (e.g. time).

it's much more practical and reasonable to require people to installed 10MB of software that provides a database engine than it is to require them to reformat their disks and migrate all their data over. Reiser isn't even available for all the platforms KDE runs on. this removes it as a potential target for a practical tool, though it would make a really cool target for a research project.

i do think that applications will drive the success of Reiser4, however. and once we have tools such as what we are building, i wouldn't be surprised if someone worked the storage layer to oprtionally use Reiser4 to produce something smaller and more performant. at that point there's a real motivator to use these kinds of file systems that goes beyond the theoretical, at which point they become interesting from the point of view of "off the shelf" software users and manufacturers.

> Read, (and try to get your head around, it's hard!),
> the Future Vision paper at:

i have =) fun stuff... i've been watching Reiser's project for some years now with great interest.

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