Re: reiser4: maybe just fix bugs?

[Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>]

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