Well, that was certainly a brash byline that lacks context. ReiserFS was second only to ext3 when Reiser went off the deep end 20 years ago. ext4 almost didn't happen and certainly delayed ext3's maintenance and further development, because of ReiserFS's growing popularity at the time.
@feld LOL, no dude, cancel culture had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Hans Reiser *was* NameSys. Without him, there was no company. Without the company, there was nobody working on ReiserFS.
Reiser5 was announced by Edward in late 2019. But you wouldn't know that because everyone intentionally ignores ReiserFS stuff now like it's radioactive.
Filesystems take at least a decade before they can be considered stable, so I'd say it's very relevant vs stuff like bcachefs which I wouldn't touch for a long long time
@feld This seems to conveniently ignore that Edward had no access to accounts and effectively no say at NameSys, to such a high degree that NameSys offices never reopened after Hans arrest.
Its multithreaded performance is still ass compared to XFS, which solved its small file problems a long time ago so it basically does everything you need
fs shrinking is insane, nobody should use that. If you're stuck in a position where you *need* to shrink an fs you did something very very wrong and you should be punished for not planning better or owning more hardware to alleviate your issue
BTRFS is also CoW and it's not super useful to compare CoW filesystem so log/journal filesystems as they have very different use cases. e.g., putting a database on a CoW is really dumb and you'll just suffer the write amplification penalty
@feld@BalooUriza I wouldn’t say it’s terrible, at least not now. I’ve had really good success with it for basic stuff and hardware caused fs corruption recovery. It’s basically the NTFS of Linux filesystems. It gets the job done, but lacks interesting features from others (deduplication, ssd optimizations, snapshots), but has some that the alternatives don’t.
For example:
XFS is faster, but cannot be repaired online, AFAIK there’s no fs shrinking
BTRFS corrupts itself if you run out of space and use compression, RAID 5/6 is broken for many years now, slows down to a crawl if you use quotas and big snapshots
>fs shrinking is insane, nobody should use that. It has it's uses. It's insane to handle on the FS and partition level, but should be supported at least while offline. Shrinking on a server/workstation is insane, that I agree. For home usage where you are more likely to need it I think it's reasonable, if you have backups.
For example you can't predict how much space you would need on a laptop for a Windows partition 5 years down the line, if you dual boot. Worst case, you can wipe everything and restore from backups for 6 hours as you extract everything from external media.
>BTRFS is also CoW and it's not super useful to compare CoW filesystem so log/journal filesystems as they have very different use cases. Agreed. I put it there only as an example of features comparison and it's problems.