Re: Read-only ReiserFS support for FreeBSD 5.x

Kalev Lember said:
> Jean-Sébastien Pédron wrote:
>
>> Since this summer, I've been working on bringing read-only ReiserFS
>> support to FreeBSD 5.x. Based on Linux 2.6.7, it seems now fairly stable
>> on the boxes I use, and it's time to share it with the community.
>> Because this is my first kernel development, I guess it's buggy and
>> slow, so use with caution :) Furthermore, you should know this is under
>> the GNU GPL license.

First off, nice job. I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, but I just
thought about this the other day and was wondering what the performance of
Reiser would be on FreeBSD.

I'm not sure how all the developers feel about GPL'd software in the
kernel, although the sound of a BSD licensed one sounds tastey.

>
> Good job!
>
> One of the things I have missed in FreeBSD is a good journaling
> filesystem. This is one of the places where Linux beats BSD: Linux
> supports far more filesystems that the BSDs do.
>
> Writing a journaling filesystem from scratch is not a trivial thing to
> do, however. Maybe we should consider using ReiserFS or some other
> journaling one as FreeBSD's primary filesystem now that the 6-current is
> branched?

It is my understanding that SoftUpdates offers the same guarantees that
journaling does. It ensures file-system consistancy even in the event of
system failure. I believe the only reason fsck is still run is to clean up
the few cases that SoftUpdates can't detect, which is just block bitmaps
and inode link counts. Neither of these are critical in that they can both
be performed by a background fsck on a snapshot of a live filesystem.

-- 
Ryan Sommers
ryans_at_gamersimpact.com