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Open Source Crime Data Storage

Hans Reiser Sends a Letter From Prison (arstechnica.com) 181

Posted by EditorDavid from the text-messages dept.
In 2003, Hans Reiser answered questions from Slashdot's readers...

Today Wikipedia describes Hans Reiser as "a computer programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer... Prior to his incarceration, Reiser created the ReiserFS computer file system, which may be used by the Linux kernel but which is now scheduled for removal in 2025, as well as its attempted successor, Reiser4."

This week alanw (Slashdot reader #1,822), spotted a development on the Linux kernel mailing list. "Hans Reiser (imprisoned for the murder of his wife) has written a letter, asking it to be published to Slashdot." Reiser writes: I was asked by a kind Fredrick Brennan for my comments that I might offer on the discussion of removing ReiserFS V3 from the kernel. I don't post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006.

I am very sorry for my crime — a proper apology would be off topic for this forum, but available to any who ask.

A detailed apology for how I interacted with the Linux kernel community, and some history of V3 and V4, are included, along with descriptions of what the technical issues were. I have been attending prison workshops, and working hard on improving my social skills to aid my becoming less of a danger to society. The man I am now would do things very differently from how I did things then.
Click here for the rest of Reiser's introduction, along with a link to the full text of the letter...

The letter is dated November 26, 2023, and ends with an address where Reiser can be mailed. Ars Technica has a good summary of Reiser's lengthy letter from prison — along with an explanation for how it came to be. With the ReiserFS recently considered obsolete and slated for removal from the Linux kernel entirely, Fredrick R. Brennan, font designer and (now regretful) founder of 8chan, wrote to the filesystem's creator, Hans Reiser, asking if he wanted to reply to the discussion on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). Reiser, 59, serving a potential life sentence in a California prison for the 2006 murder of his estranged wife, Nina Reiser, wrote back with more than 6,500 words, which Brennan then forwarded to the LKML. It's not often you see somebody apologize for killing their wife, explain their coding decisions around balanced trees versus extensible hashing, and suggest that elementary schools offer the same kinds of emotional intelligence curriculum that they've worked through in prison, in a software mailing list. It's quite a document...

It covers, broadly, why Reiser believes his system failed to gain mindshare among Linux users, beyond the most obvious reason. This leads Reiser to detail the technical possibilities, his interpersonal and leadership failings and development, some lingering regrets about dealings with SUSE and Oracle and the Linux community at large, and other topics, including modern Russian geopolitics... Reiser asks that a number of people who worked on ReiserFS be included in "one last release" of the README, and to "delete anything in there I might have said about why they were not credited." He says prison has changed him in conflict resolution and with his "tendency to see people in extremes...."

Reiser writes that he understood the difficulty ahead in getting the Linux world to "shift paradigms" but lacked the understanding of how to "make friends and allies of people" who might initially have felt excluded. This is followed by a heady discussion of "balanced trees instead of extensible hashing," Oracle's history with implementing balanced trees, getting synchronicity just right, I/O schedulers, block size, seeks and rotational delays on magnetic hard drives, and tails. It leads up to a crucial decision in ReiserFS' development, the hard non-compatible shift from V3 to Reiser 4. Format changes, Reiser writes, are "unwanted by many for good reasons." But "I just had to fix all these flaws, fix them and make a filesystem that was done right. It's hard to explain why I had to do it, but I just couldn't rest as long as the design was wrong and I knew it was wrong," he writes. SUSE didn't want a format change, but Reiser, with hindsight, sees his pushback as "utterly inarticulate and unsociable." The push for Reiser 4 in the Linux kernel was similar, "only worse...."

He encourages people to "allow those who worked so hard to build a beautiful filesystem for the users to escape the effects of my reputation." Under a "Conclusion" sub-heading, Reiser is fairly succinct in summarizing a rather wide-ranging letter, minus the minutiae about filesystem architecture.

I wish I had learned the things I have been learning in prison about talking through problems, and believing I can talk through problems and doing it, before I had married or joined the LKML. I hope that day when they teach these things in Elementary School comes.

I thank Richard Stallman for his inspiration, software, and great sacrifices,

It has been an honor to be of even passing value to the users of Linux. I wish all of you well.


It both is and is not a response to Brennan's initial prompt, asking how he felt about ReiserFS being slated for exclusion from the Linux kernel. There is, at the moment, no reply to the thread started by Brennan.

Here is the rest of Reiser's introduction to his 6,500-word letter:

Perhaps some might accept my apology; others might learn from my mistakes if I describe them well; some might find the design issues interesting.

I will leave it to the users to decide whether ReiserFS V3 is still useful. Users should understand that it is a burden for those who maintain VFS and the like to have to test their changes on an additional filesystem, especially given Linux filesystems are hard code at the VFS layer.

ReiserFS 4 provides a more maintainable basis for the future for those users wo like the features of V3. If V3 isn't used it should go, I trust the users and the kernel maintainers to discuss whether it is used, and to make the right decision together.


[Click here to read the letter in its entirety. Below is the beginning of what Reiser has labeled as his main text...]


V3 had a moment in time when it was useful, and I am happy that we were able to contribute to the success of GNU/Linux for a few crucial years during which it was growing rapidly in usage. Chris Mason's contribution of journaling was the most practically useful feature of V3, and I thank him for it...
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Hans Reiser Sends a Letter From Prison More

Hans Reiser Sends a Letter From Prison

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  • Didn't read the manual .. like don't google on ‘how to murder your wife and get away with it’. Also important, don't remove the passenger seat from your car, don't hose-down the interior and don't leave two books on police murder investigations inside the car. Finally don't leave a blood stained sleeping-bag cover in the car with your deceased wife's blood on it. Apart from that, it was a perfect crime /s

  • Man that's a lot (Score:3)

    by cfalcon ( 779563 ) on Sunday January 21, 2024 @12:38AM (#64176213)

    What a wild letter. ReiserFS, if subject to continued development by someone as passionate about it as Reiser himself, would be really awesome by now. Reiser's story has always been just so tragic and ultimately needless.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 )

      His story isn’t tragic, his wife’s and children’s story is the tragic one.

      • Re:Man that's a lot (Score:4, Insightful)

        by piojo ( 995934 ) on Sunday January 21, 2024 @02:51AM (#64176345)

        Everybody born into a body with a psychopath brain is a tragedy. Everyone born into a massively unhappy biochemistry (including anger problems) is a tragedy. Everyone that discovers the techniques or medicines to escape unhappiness is a miracle.

        Being in tragic circumstances such as Reiser's wife and children is obviously also tragic. But my point is that you would not ask to be in the shoes of someone so consumed by rage and fear that they felt the need to kill. It would totally suck.

        I also read an interesting analysis on Substack (which I can't find now) that pointed out resentment could indicate low social status, and would lead to decreased romantic opportunity. Because someone with high status would expect their persecutors to be punished, and so would not dwell too much in resentment. A person with low status would continue to feel victimized as their persecutor got away with it. And potential romantic partners would naturally not want to be with this person. My point is that being resentful sucks for other reasons than just the resentment--as though resentment weren't enough suckage on its own. Resentment is drinking poison and hoping it harms someone else.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jd ( 1658 )

          Only one person has been known to definitely escape a psychopathic brain. It wasn't through medicine, either. It was through a high quality non-abusive upbringing. He's now a top notch brain surgeon and his story is reasonably well documented because it defied what had been conventional understanding until his case was discovered.

          There's no telling if Hans Reiser could have done as well for himself. Nobody understands the brain well enough. But it can't be ruled out.

          • That surgeon is super interesting - his BBC special is worth watching.

            Down the iq spectrum it's speculated that many men working in slaughterhouses are usefully employed members of this group. Also the military.

            Also politics, but they're quite harmful there.

            When it's comorbid with adhd, increasing dopamine can help with frontal lobe inhibition problems, but society is 90% lined up against making treatment anything but arduous.

            The Curse of the Puritans lines up well with the Prison Guards Union and its allie

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Actually, it is. Same as the wife's and children's. Requires compassion to see that. You seem to be lacking.

      • His story isnâ(TM)t tragic, his wifeâ(TM)s and childrenâ(TM)s story is the tragic one.

        Oedipus' story isn't tragic, his father and mother's story is the tragic one.

  • Toxic, brilliant, stupid. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gavron ( 1300111 ) on Sunday January 21, 2024 @01:34AM (#64176273)

    Too often people commit criminal acts and are free. See e.g. Donald Trump.

    Reiser is so toxic any discussion on LKML, Phoronix, Ars, etc. has devolved to his murder case within 2 post of any topic.

    He did the crime. He's doing the time. It's a well-written letter that makes it clear he still knows his shit about filesystem internals.
    The linux kernel maintainers have moved on. The users of filesystems in the lk have moved on.

    Why did he write such a lengthy letter? What are his goals? Don't know. Don't care.
    Brilliant guy, but oh so stupid.

    • Re: Toxic, brilliant, stupid. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by nosfucious ( 157958 ) on Sunday January 21, 2024 @04:22AM (#64176431)

      An important step for recovering alcoholics is to apologise to as many people that were affected to oneâ(TM)s drinking, as possible.

      As an act of contrition on your part, and to perhaps find some comfort or closure for the innocently affected.

      Best guess is that Hans needs to do the same. Obviously impossible for his wife, but he would need to do this as well to his extended family. Just one of many such letters. This letter to the Linux community sounds personally written and addresses key issues. The evil canâ(TM)t be undone but it can be minimised.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by znrt ( 2424692 )

      Too often people commit criminal acts and are free. See e.g. Donald Trump.

      i have zero sympathy for donald trump, he's a really disgusting human being, essentially a pathologically narcissistic conman. if you examine his mandate, however, it turns out he's the president of the united states with less blood on his hands in the last 3 decades (at least), by a wide margin. and that's including the chaotic pullout from afghanistan which left a huge swath of former "collaborators" in the fire.

      i concede that this is very likely due to his lack of deep connections to elites. he was an an

  • nobody told Reiser Slashdot is dead, too (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SethJohnson ( 112166 ) on Sunday January 21, 2024 @01:36AM (#64176275) Homepage Journal
    Dude killed his wife and his legacy, thinks he's going to rescue the latter by writing an open letter to a website that has catastrophically diminished during his incarceration. I suppose that's fitting.

    Since his wife doesn't have the opportunity to have a letter printed, I would've preferred that Slashdot not give him this attention, regardless of how limited that attention is nowadays. Weirdly, the letter was transmitted to Slashdot, but this summary references an Ars Techica story about the letter...

    • He didn't kill his legacy, that died a natural death. In the open source world legacies die when no one picks up your work. The filesystem isn't murdering anyone, the legacy was still there, but it just got old and slowly wallowed away in irrelevance. It was a shame too since ReiserFS had a lot of promise, but ultimately one of its biggest benefits was obsoleted by ext3 at which point there was little use for it anymore.

      But my point is, assuming for the moment he didn't kill anyone, would his legacy remain?

      • The filesystem had a lot of innovation. However, times change. Xiafs was awesome for its time as well, but ext2 eventually rendered that obsolete. These days, ZFS or btrfs are probably the best general purpose filesystems going for Linux, with ext4 and XFS also useful.

        As far as I know, ReiserFS doesn't have any checksumming or scrubbing available, which is something needed for modern filesystems.

        • These days, ZFS or btrfs are probably the best general purpose filesystems going for Linux, with ext4 and XFS also useful.

          ZFS if you have lots of ram, btrfs or ext4 if you don't. Still smart to wait for brtfs to have another version or two IMO.
          XFS stagnated, no good reason for it now that there is ext4.

          • You don't need lots of RAM for ZFS. You can run it perfectly happily on a raspberry pi if that's your thing. ZFS's "requirements" come from default setup of read caching to speed up system performance. It's not a necessary to run caches the size they are setup with by default in ZFS, additionally you can setup caching with any other file system too, in RAM. Likewise RAM requirements is also part of data-dedupe, also not a necessary function of ZFS.

            You need lots of RAM if you want to use and turn on every f

            • The reason I want to use ZFS is its features. Using the features requires a bunch of memory. So I choose platforms where they are not starved for memory, problem solved.

              If I didn't want to use the features, I wouldn't use ZFS.

          • I know other people run ZFS on a Raspberry Pi, but I've found btrfs good enough for that. I do agree about a couple versions, especially them mainstreaming fscrypt, so btrfs has some type of solid filesystem encryption, and doesn't need a LUKS layer underneath or using something like CryFS on top of it.

            I'd also like to see the nocow stuff addressed, so btrfs can be used for an iSCSI target without the iSCSI image which is presented as a LUN losing all checksumming protection.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      Would you also rather that Ian Brady, serial killer and psychopath, had not written a book that outlined deficits in police thinking that allowed him, and later on other serial killers, to go uncaptured for a long time?

      Nobody thinks Ian Brady wrote it out of any social concern, but if it leads to less police arrogance and more effective police thinking, then who cares why he wrote it?

      Why should I care any more about why Hans Reiser wrote a letter? If it leads to even one person questioning dysfunctional att

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Some people just use failings by others to fake-elevate themselves. These people usually argue against any kind of mercy, which makes me think they may be some variant of psychopath themselves. The person you responded to seems to qualify.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Prisons that actually try to rehabilitate are too expensive. It's more efficient to use them as a source of slave labor.
        Do I think that's morally sound? No. But I think it's what we do. People do change over time, for one thing, among males the testosterone tends to decrease when you hit your 40's. Among women, there's a weakly analogous process called menopause.

        OTOH, and with a complete lack of information, my wild guess is that he liked to listen to music like "El Passo", and "Banks of the Ohio". Mi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Njovich ( 553857 )

      Well the worse thing for him is probably that hdd's are practically dead. With 2TB 5GB/s storage being available at 100 dollars, a lot of the possible value of something like ReiserFS will be gone when he comes out in a couple of years. His b-tree and plugin efforts were interesting but ultimately futile efforts to solve a problem nobody cares about anymore outside of some small niches that have their own solutions.

  • Everybody Loves Eric Raymond comic from around the time

    https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymo... [geekz.co.uk]

    In a way, it's a terrible shame that ReiserFS is deprecated. It could have been so much more, the options were ext2, xfs, or reiserfs. It wasn't slow for the majority of workloads. People didn't like xfs much, that didn't seem as tight in the community. Reiserfs looked a very good option.

    Memories.

    Dear lord, at what point do you say to yourself killing your wife is the answer?

  • After all, he came up with a killer filesystem.

  • Not a Rose (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Sunday January 21, 2024 @09:06AM (#64176745) Homepage Journal

    Imagine if ext4 were called TsoFS and then Ted was accused of doing something terrible.

    Lesson learned: don't ever do this.

    Heaven help us if Linus misbehaves or is falsely accused!

    Even Gates, of all people, didn't go with Gates, Inc. but let his girlfriend pick a name for his company.

    • Something terrible like intentionally spreading disease? Or aiding rom-con scammers? Yeah those things do reflect poorly on a person a movement and an ideology. All your efforts came to naught.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by iamacat ( 583406 )

      That's on us if we are so idiotic that we can't separate a creation from its creator. Asperger's is quite clearly not autism and is not necessarily disabling, with many affected having great family and professional lives. Conflating the two exposes some to unnecessary stigma and interventions and deprives others of full support they need. All because we have some beef with long dead author.

      I would be happy to try out ReiserFS if it's indeed better for something. I would also support Hans Reiser being given

      • He's in the American legal system, so naturally anybody who can do anything valuable is prevented from doing so. The guy only murdered his wife; he could be prevented from harming wives forever while still contributing to society from his cubical in prison. Instead society has to pay to house him by more than we spend to educate a child.

        Aperger's not long before the DSM change had a study showing genetic correlation while proving no correlation with Autism. Knowing both in person, they are not the same unle

  • It covers, broadly, why Reiser believes his system failed to gain mindshare among Linux users, beyond the most obvious reason.

    You mean data loss, right?

    Right?

    ReiserFS was unpopular because it was widely known for data loss before we even knew Hans killed his wife. That's why it failed to gain mindshare. You don't "move fast and break things" when you're storing people's data. The same thing happened to XFS. I personally lost data to that one. I was never enough of a sucker to use ReiserFS though, because it was obvious that the developer didn't care about your data from early on. I thought he was just a sociopath, which is common

  • because I don't care, and I can't imagine anyone other than his inlaws do

  • First, give the convicted murderer less of a soapbox. Second, to throw away technology only because it was developed by [insert Godwin's Law subject here] or infamous person would demonstrate a childish, virtue-signalling failure to separate politics from what's best.
    • It's an ethical question, not a political question. If we have alternatives, we should use them. ReisferFS brings nothing new to the table anymore.

  • I'm very sorry I got caught -- Hans Reiser (probably)

  • And most importantly, I have a million other things I could do than read his letter.

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