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By Vincent Ryan Enterprise Linux IT February 10, 2004 12:07PM
Hans Reiser, author of the ReiserFS program, created benchmarking tests designed to be fairly representative of the file-size distribution of most users. "Reiser4 does quite well on all benchmarks," he said. "With [Reiser4], we took five different technical gambles, and all of them worked. The result is very high performance."
Although there are a number of filesystems that can be used in Linux environments, ReiserFS is becoming a favorite among systems administrators. In addition to being one of the fastest filesystems available, it eliminates file corruption and uses hard-drive space more efficiently than other options.
Though it has been a long-time coming, a new version of ReiserFS — Reiser4 — is scheduled to hit the open-source world in the next month or so. This new version is a complete rewrite from version 3 and brings "journaled" filesystems to another level. It is also the first salvo in an inevitable battle with Microsoft's Longhorn filesystem.
Reiser4 has a performance boost two to five times that of version 3, Hans Reiser, the program's author, told NewsFactor. The "atomic" filesystem ensures data integrity — crashes cannot corrupt file operations — and does it without a performance hit, because a new algorithm means data does not have to be copied twice. Reiser4 uses the faster "dancing trees" algorithm instead of the balanced tree algorithm previously used, so it is more space efficient than block-alignment filesystems, Reiser said.
Reiser4 also can scale to a large number of CPUs, because it uses "per node" locking. "We lock nodes in the tree that we need to modify while performing a [change to a file]," Reiser said. In version 3, the entire filesystem would lock, so multiple CPUs could not modify different parts of the tree simultaneously. Reiser4 also locks the tree from bottom up rather than top down. Most databases lock as much as they possibly need to, but Reiser4 only locks what it has to, Reiser said.
Reiser4 also features built-in encryption and compression plug-ins. Compression and encryption occur when data is "flushed" to the disk rather than with each write, Reiser said. Therefore, a frequently used file is not continually compressed and encrypted, hogging system resources.
The plug-in infrastructure of ReiserFS makes the system easily customizable, Reiser said. There are already researchers working on plug-ins that will give Reiser4 "security attributes that we couldn't have imagined," Reiser said. "We hope it will lead to all kinds of innovation," he added.
Namesys puts the ReiserFS code through a "strenuous" QA process before submitting it, Reiser noted. He said he has been working on Reiser4 for three years, and the program is about a month away from release. "Once it is submitted, I expect that it will be accepted [by the Linux community]."
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