> The reason why I ignore the tar+gzip tests is that in the past Hans
> has rigged the test by using a tar ball which was generated by
> unpacking a set of kernel sources on a reiser4 filesystem, and then
> repacking them using tar+gzip. The result was a tar file whose files
> were optimally laid out so that reiser4 could insert them into the
> filesystem b-tree without doing any extra work.
>
> I can't say for sure whether or not this set of benchmarks has done
> this (there's not enough information describing the benchmark setup),
> but the sad fact of the matter is that people trying to pitch Reiser4
> have generated for themselves a reputation for using rigged
> benchmarks. Hans's used of a carefully stacked and ordered tar file
> (which is the same as stacking a deck of cards), and your repeated use
> of the bonnee++ benchmarks despite being told that it is a meaningless
> result given the fact that well, zero's compress very well and most
> people are interested in storing a file of all zeros, has caused me to
> look at any benchmarks cited by Reiser4 partisans with a very
> jaundiced and skeptical eye.
>
> Fortunately for you, it's not up to me whether or not Reiser4 makes it
> into the kernel. And if it works for you, hey, go wild. You can
> always patch it into your own kernel and encourage others to do the
> same with respect to getting it tested and adopted. My personal take
> on it is that Reiser3, Reiser4 and JFS suffer the same problems, which
> is to say they have a very small and limited development community,
> and this was referenced in Novell's decision to drop Reiser3:
>
>
http://linux.wordpress.com/2006/09/27/suse-102-ditching-reiserfs-as-it-default-fs/
>
> SuSE has deprecated Reiser3 *and* JFS, and I believe quite strongly it
> is the failure of the organizations to attract a diverse development
> community is ultimately what doomed them in the long term, both in
> terms of support as the kernel migrated and new feature support. It
> is for that reason that Hans' personality traits that tend to drive
> away those developers who would help them, beyond those that he hires,
> is what has been so self-destructive to Reiser4. Read the
> announcement Jeff Mahoney from SUSE Labs again; he pointed out was
> that reiser3 was getting dropped even though it performs better than
> ext3 in some scenarios. There are many other considerations, such as
> a filesystem's robustness in case on-disk corruption, long term
> maintenance as the kernel maintains, availability of developers to
> provide bug fixes, how well the system performs on systems with
> multiple cores/CPU's, etc.
