Linux's ReiserFS Plan Is To Deprecate It, Remove The File-System In 2025

[Berniyh]

is there a big burden for maintaining it? if not, I don't see the point of getting rid of it.

There isn't really a burden since it's not maintained by anybody.
Which is the main reason to remove it. Unmaintained code is a bad thing and can potentially hinder development (see the BKL post above).

there's tons of use cases for keeping it in the kernel still. suppose I'm dumping some filesystem on an embedded platform and want to analyze its contents.

I have my doubts about that. Are there really embedded devices using this fs?
If this was the case, I'd expect at least some people to speak up saying "I need this!", which isn't really the case.
Anyway, just for that purpose it would be perfectly fine to have it as a fuse filesystem, no need to have it in the kernel just to be able to dump the contents of some device's filesystem.

[L_A_G]

Hopefully, Hans gets free by that time.

I had an inkling he was already out, but looked it up and turns out he had his first chance to apply for parole in 2020 and was denied. Apparently his next chance is in 2023, by which time he'll have served 15 years for his "15 to life" sentence and could actually be paroled.

Not saying he should get out by then or that his sentence was too harsh, just that my frame or reference is here in Finland sentences are far more lenient here and he, as a first timer, would probably be out by now.

[RahulSundaram]

A subtle note; yes ext4 can mount ext3 and ext2 if you have CONFIG_EXT4_USE_FOR_EXT2=y. There does not appear to be any ext3 only code left, but there is still separate ext2 code. I imagine it is still around so you can select only ext2 to minimize kernel size.

That's a good note. I looked it up and it does appear that ext2 is being used in places where a simpler filesystem is desirable and/or a minimal size is desirable. In Fedora this separate ext2 code is not used. Ext4 filesystem driver is used to support both ext3/ext2 as well as Ext4 itself so the support burden is minimized. Logically it makes sense for other distributions to do the same thing outside of specialized needs.

[GI_Jack]

The only use case is recovering data off old reiser partitions from machines of decades past. This might be needed, as the rieser was the default for debian at one point. As someone who once made a liveos, the vast FS support of the kernel, and even fuse made this a very potent tool in doing recovery information extraction on a wide range of machines.

but perhaps this need is fufilled by fuse better at this point.

[tildearrow]

See Nate you ruined the thread :<
Tried our best to make sure we would stay on topic, but...

*sighs* There are technical reasons to remove ReiserFS, but murder isn't a reason.

[rmoog]

Hey, I just wanted to chime in. I use ReiserFS on all of my computers because I need to keep around a large amount of log files. I think Linux will become less useful if ReiserFS goes away. My use case isn't served best by other filesystems available. I would like to see one day that people let go of their grudge with the filesystem. It had nothing to do with Nina's death and this project is being needlessly targetted and harassed by the world at large because of Hans' involvement in the filesystem's development. We've gone completely mad and made the word "Reiser" the n-word of IT. Can we please stop this madness and sacrifice our hubris for a good filesystem designed for keeping large amounts of small files? Thank you.

[Berniyh]

Hey, I just wanted to chime in. I use ReiserFS on all of my computers because I need to keep around a large amount of log files. I think Linux will become less useful if ReiserFS goes away. My use case isn't served best by other filesystems available.

In your case, is ReiserFS really the best option? Did you actually perform tests that led you to that conclusion or did you jump to it because of the usual statement that "ReiserFS is the best because many small files".
What I want to say is: I'd check if it actually makes a difference and if not, I'd move on to another one.
btrfs could be an alternative here as it has some improvements for small files like sparse files and tail packing.
And in addition it supports checksumming (which I'd consider important for log files) as well as transparent compression and deduplication.
However, it doesn't perform the best in every use case, so it really depends on what you're actually doing with those files and what operations are critical.

Generally speaking, the approach of just spamming a file system with many small files seems very inefficient and broken.
It might be better to do something about that than to adapt and use a rotting filesystem.
Just saying.

[rmoog]

In your case, is ReiserFS really the best option? Did you actually perform tests that led you to that conclusion or did you jump to it because of the usual statement that "ReiserFS is the best because many small files".
What I want to say is: I'd check if it actually makes a difference and if not, I'd move on to another one.
btrfs could be an alternative here as it has some improvements for small files like sparse files and tail packing.
And in addition it supports checksumming (which I'd consider important for log files) as well as transparent compression and deduplication.
However, it doesn't perform the best in every use case, so it really depends on what you're actually doing with those files and what operations are critical.

Generally speaking, the approach of just spamming a file system with many small files seems very inefficient and broken.
It might be better to do something about that than to adapt and use a rotting filesystem.
Just saying.

I used to use btrfs for root filesystems in 2012-2017 and for log storage in 2015-2021. btrfs failed me as a root filesystem, it ate my Gentoo install. Then, I needed a filesystem that isn't very CPU and memory intensive, so I've decided to give ReiserFS a try. It works, it's does what it's meant for and not much else. I'm pretty happy with it.

[Quackdoc]

I used to use btrfs for root filesystems in 2012-2017 and for log storage in 2015-2021. btrfs failed me as a root filesystem, it ate my Gentoo install. Then, I needed a filesystem that isn't very CPU and memory intensive, so I've decided to give ReiserFS a try. It works, it's does what it's meant for and not much else. I'm pretty happy with it.

hopefully this will line up with bcachefs nicely

[NobodyXu]

I used to use btrfs for root filesystems in 2012-2017 and for log storage in 2015-2021. btrfs failed me as a root filesystem, it ate my Gentoo install. Then, I needed a filesystem that isn't very CPU and memory intensive, so I've decided to give ReiserFS a try. It works, it's does what it's meant for and not much else. I'm pretty happy with it.

Why not EXT4 or XFS?

Both are the most stable filesystem on Linux you can get and neither of them is CPU and memory intensive.