Zusammenfassung
Reiser4 is the new version of ReiserFS expected to ship this summer. It implements a form of journaling called wandering logs which allows committing data atomically without writing it twice. Thanks to this great reduction in the cost of atomicity, it is feasible to make every file system call a fully atomic transaction.
Reiser4 offers greatly enhanced performance using innovations in tree design theory. These include squeezing tree nodes at flush time instead of at every modification to the tree, and replacing BLOBs with "twig extents". It also creates a complete plugin infrastructure that allows one to construct custom made file objects. Inheritance, constraints, encryption at flush time, and compression at flush time have been implemented.
Expediency often tempts security researchers into adding architecturally inelegant extensions to filesystems. We have systematically reviewed all of the infrastructure lackings that tempt security researchers into implementing inelegance, and systematically approached remedying them via the above features.
ﾜber den Autor
Hans Reiser entered U.C. Berkeley after completing the 8th grade, and obtained an individual major in systematizing. His senior thesis was on how the philosophy of computer science differed from the scientific method used in the natural sciences.
In 1993 he went to Russia (from the USA where he was born) to hire a team of programmers to build a filesystem. Completely unqualified for the work, it took twice as long as it would have if they had been experienced, and most of the programmers quit before it was debugged (Vladimir Saveljev stayed, and helped work long hours). At that time, Hans Reiser worked a day job as a contractor in Silicon Valley to support the team, and argued over algorithms by email at night and on weekends. This whole process was the standard entrepreneurial hell, and it lasted more than 5 years.
In 1999 ReiserFS started to work well enough that, thanks to the generous sponsorship of SuSE, Ecila, and MP3.com, he was able to quit his day job. Now he works full-time with a team of 12 developers developing Reiser4, the new version of ReiserFS containing all the things they learned they should have done with the first version.
