I grabbed the reiser4 patch for 2.6.14-rc5 and compiled it. Thanks to Vladimir V. Saveliev's comments about
EXPORT_SYMBOL(clear_page_dirty_for_io); in mm/page-writeback.c, I was able to get it working as a module, and it seems to have taken care of it. I would have waited for the official 2.6.14-mm1 reiser patch before upgrading to 2.6.14, but CD burning didn't work with 2.6.12. <rant> There is, btw, one main reason that I've decided that whatever trouble it may cause, and whatever growing pangs I may experience along the way, root reiser4 is worth it. Does anybody remember GoBack? It was a versioning system for windows 95/98 that was incredibly flexible and useful. Tracked all changes to the whole disk. Old versions of a file? no problem. grab an old version of a directory for referance temporarily? easy. Got a virus? revert the whole HD, and then grab the newer copies of your documents and saved games as needed. Microsoft includes an almost useless version of the same ability with their "system restore" facility on XP, but I've never seen or heard of anybody using it. And rightfully so, it majorly stinks. It doesn't track all files, it's interface is opaque, the fact that it even exists is hidden seven layers deep, you can't control which files are restored, you can't list previous versions of a file, you can't copy an old version of a subdirectory and it's contents out without wiping the new version. You can bet that in 10 years or so, Microsoft will come out with a version of system restore that doesn't suck though. Integrated into the file manager, right click access, and everything else too. Goback is the only thing that I missed when I switched over to linux, and reiser4 is the only thing I've found that even hints at a similar ability. Even if it takes another 10 years to reach the same point of usability that GoBack had, it'll be well worth it. And when that day comes, I won't even have to reformat (you didn't have to reformat to install GoBack, either.) It's been 10 years or so since my last format (Hrmm... a little over eight, actually) and I figured that as long as my HD was trashed (another reason to love reiser4 - any fs that has a standard tool that commonly trashes file systems beyond any hope of recovery... darn fsck.ext3) I might as well prepare for the future, and get better performance while I'm at it. Note though, that features are definitely the first thing for me, performance is nice but not something that I'll notice too much, and I'd definitely be willing to sacrifice some to get enhanced semantics or versioning. Compiles take forever no matter what you do, and as long as the little things (like starting vim) don't take longer than a second or two, that's good enough. </rant>
