Introduction
ReiserFS is the name of a file system designed and developed by Hans Reiser. It is primarily passe by GNU / Linux, but it may be passe by other operating systems. It was the first journaling file system to be integrated into the standard Linux kernel (version 2.4.1).
Technical details
Despite having advantages over Ext3, especially for the treatment of directories containing thousands of microscopic files, it is, for now, less used than the latter. This is partly because it is impossible to convert a partition in Ext2 ReiserFS without training, and the inability to use the backup software dump that is heavily used in business.
The long-term goal of Hans Reiser is to originate a hard disk drive file system that will be effective if worn indiscriminately as:
* File system,
* System of sequential indexes, as is primitive by applications,
* Management system database.
Thus, all data maintained by the operating system will be visible in the same namespace. To achieve this goal, Reiser and its developers have developed unusual algorithms. Similarly, Microsoft has similar ambitions with its hold WinFS.
The most used is ReiserFS 3.x, but the version Reiser4, a complete rewrite, has now been incorporated into the experimental branch-mm (maintained by Andrew Morton) Linux kernel 2.6.
Performance
ReiserFS allows very good time for the same subdirectories containing tens of thousands of files. This is not the case for requiring ext3fs prioritize "by hand" its directories even if this damages the ergonomics of their access. It is however a bit slower in other cases.
This characteristic is therefore used as a medium of choice for everything that is ensiling bulk content hierarchy from the Net (Web pages, images, sounds, videos …), and in particular automatic collection of images in Usenet forums through nget. Ext3fs is sometimes preferred for other uses.
ReiserFS is powerful more effective on Ext2 / Ext3 hard disk drives as it regards the storage of small files (less than a few KB). For example, when converting to a ReiserFS partition with 2GB of data (a Linux distribution standard) stored in ext2, 200 MB of free space will have been earned.
