Kernel Developer Hans Reiser to Speak at SVLUG
Hans Reiser, architect of the Reiser filesystem and founder of namesys, will speak about the new version 4 of the ReiserFS at the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group's next meeting.
The meeting will be held Wednesday, November 6 at 7pm, at Cisco Systems, Building 9 in San Jose, California. The meeting is free and open to the public.
ReiserFS is one of several journaling filesystems available for Linux. Its key advantages include space efficiency, as it can pack several small files, or the tails of several large files, in a single disk block.
The SVLUG announcement for the talk reads, in part:
Reiser4 is the fastest Linux filesystem, performing 50-100% faster than ReiserFS V3. It performs all filesystem operations as atomic transactions and creates a foundation for a general purpose atomic transaction kernel API. It is built on a plugin-based infrastructure that makes it feasible to implement security attributes as just files with particular file features selected. It is highly scalable due to the use of per-node locking in its balancing operations. Like version 3 it stores small files space efficiently (packing them using database-like tree algorithms), but its performance is much higher when it does so.
Reiser4 employs dancing trees rather than balanced trees and rejects the BLOB approach, which may make the talk of interest to database specialists.
SVLUG is the oldest and one of the largest Linux user groups in the world, founded as the "PC-Unix SIG" three years before the first release of Linux.
Look for the first part of Hans Reiser's article, "Trees in the Reiser4 Filesystem", in the December 2002 issue of Linux Journal.
email: dmarti@ssc.com
