Linux Developers Discuss Deprecating & Removing ReiserFS

[DanL]

It seems that you don't follow the news, as Reiser5 is more advanced than ZFS and Btrfs and is specifically designed to fix their shortcomings.

It seems you don't understand context, as we're talking about the original reiserfs found in the kernel. Reiser4/5 lives out-of-tree.

[Sin2x]

I don't know why I am kind of defending reiserfs, I was not a big fan.

I was an early adopter of reiserfs around 2000, but then it failed catastrophically on the main mail server of the University where I was working.
When I tried to run an fsck, I got the message "This is the act of a deperate man ..."
Needless to say it did not work and I had to restores from backups.

I never touched reiserfs again since that day.

XFS was my go-to filesystem for a very long time. But you could end up with the files (that was open) all zero'ed when the power fails suddenly or in case of a kernel crash.
Nvidia drivers were prone to lock up your kernel back then.

When ext4 was released in 2008, it had less features than the 1994 designed XFS, so ext4 failed to impress me.

I remember when JFS was a thing. Those were the days!

[Sin2x]

Yeah, he did plenty of benchmarks back in the day when reiserfs was relevant (and even beyond that). Searching for them is an exercise left to you.
Or, if you want the TL;DR version - ext4 made reiserfs irrelevant.

It seems that you don't follow the news, as Reiser5 is more advanced than ZFS and Btrfs and is specifically designed to fix their shortcomings.

[Raka555]

I don't know why I am kind of defending reiserfs, I was not a big fan.

I was an early adopter of reiserfs around 2000, but then it failed catastrophically on the main mail server of the University where I was working.
When I tried to run an fsck, I got the message "This is the act of a deperate man ..."
Needless to say it did not work and I had to restores from backups.

I never touched reiserfs again since that day.

XFS was my go-to filesystem for a very long time. But you could end up with the files (that was open) all zero'ed when the power fails suddenly or in case of a kernel crash.
Nvidia drivers were prone to lock up your kernel back then.

When ext4 was released in 2008, it had less features than the 1994 designed XFS, so ext4 failed to impress me.

So none of the linux filesystems are actually truly modern (maybe btrfs is an exception)
The news around btrfs just never inspired confidence.

The 2006 released ZFS is setting the trend ... (it has its own issues)

[Raka555]

it didn't work out that way with Debian.

I bet only a small percentage of people know that it stands for Debra and Ian

[lowflyer]

The teaching seems to be: don't name a project after one's own name unless you want your project's reputation die with yourself.

it didn't work out that way with Debian.

[Raka555]

Raka555

Reiserfs wasn't the fastest Linux file system. I bet ext4 is much faster in most cases.

Ext4 was not the fastest either. In fact the early ext3/ext4 filesystem were extremely slow.
20 years of optimizing might have paid off.

[CochainComplex]

Someone wants to kill the ReiserFS project... Pun intended?

Seriously what should ReiserFS do better then the existing usual suspect's?
I remember using it with SuseLinux 7 back in the early 2000. AFAIK selling point for me was journalling. Can't remember the other pro arguments back then. But I have to admit I was a beginner at that time.

[DanL]

Also, Michael, in the article you say "Plus these days EXT4, XFS, and Btrfs are all better choices and even OpenZFS." -- do you have the benchmarks to defend your point? Would be nice to see those, especially with a lot of small files on the partition, like in the real world as opposed to the synthetic lab tests.

Yeah, he did plenty of benchmarks back in the day when reiserfs was relevant (and even beyond that). Searching for them is an exercise left to you.
Or, if you want the TL;DR version - ext4 made reiserfs irrelevant.

[Volta]

Raka555

Reiserfs wasn't the fastest Linux file system. I bet ext4 is much faster in most cases.