Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Andrea Arcangeli
2004-08-26T11:42:41Z

On Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 01:35:01AM -0700, Hans Reiser wrote:
> Reiser4 plugins are not for end users to download from amazon.com, they
> are for weekend hackers to send me a cool plugin for me to review,
> assign a plugin id to, and send to Linus in the next release. Sometimes

then what's the difference in having the plugin fixed in stone into
reiserfs? That's my whole point. Get the patch from the weekend hacker,
check it, send the patch to Linus to add the new feature to reiser4,
just call it "feature" not plugin. That's how it works normally for
everything. Many fs have many features, many of them optional. you
wouldn't need to build any hook infrastructure either that way. Hooks
would be needed if this wasn't open source me thinks. Or if you want
people to fetch the module from amazon without your review.

Another reason I could see the modularization/hooking useful is if those
feature would take lots of kernel space, but this sure isn't the case
for reiserfs, infact having modules would waste _more_ ram due the half
wasted page allocation for the module text. The only single reason we
use modules is to avoid wasting tons of ram by loading every possible
device driver on earth, it's not that we use modules because they're
more flexible, if something they're more fragile. I never use modules in
my test kernel just to go fast (because I self compile them). The last
good thing of the modules is during development you don't need to reboot
the machine to test a kernel change in a driver, but you don't need that
with reiserfs since you can make the fs itself a module (just change the
name of the fs, AFIK you do that all the time already).