Re: reiser4: maybe just fix bugs?

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Tue Aug 01 2006 - 07:49:56 EST


Andrew Morton wrote:
On Mon, 31 Jul 2006 10:26:55 +0100
"Denis Vlasenko" <vda.linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


The reiser4 thread seem to be longer than usual.


Meanwhile here's poor old me trying to find another four hours to finish
reviewing the thing.

The writeout code is ugly, although that's largely due to a mismatch between
what reiser4 wants to do and what the VFS/MM expects it to do. If it
works, we can live with it, although perhaps the VFS could be made smarter.

I'd say that resier4's major problem is the lack of xattrs, acls and
direct-io. That's likely to significantly limit its vendor uptake. (As
might the copyright assignment thing, but is that a kernel.org concern?)

The plugins appear to be wildly misnamed - they're just an internal
abstraction layer which permits later feature additions to be added in a
clean and safe manner. Certainly not worth all this fuss.

Could I suggest that further technical critiques of reiser4 include a
file-and-line reference? That should ease the load on vger.

I haven't really reviewed it, but when I grepped through it last, I
found a few alarming things, like use of __put_page, trying to remove
pages from pagecache (duplicating parts of vmscan.c, plus bugs), and
taking tree_lock.

Mostly didn't look like big problems to fix, but should be fixed for
mm/ maintainers' sanity. Maybe it's better now, though.

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
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