Linux 5.18 Moves Ahead With Deprecating ReiserFS

Following the recent developer discussions around deprecating and removing the ReiserFS file-system from the mainline kernel, the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel is going ahead and deprecating it.

There was a consensus among upstream kernel developers to deprecate ReiserFS given that there are no notable users of it any longer, the code is barely maintained, and no legitimate reasons have been found to user ReiserFS over any of the modern alternatives like EXT4, XFS, Btrfs, F2FS, etc.

ReiserFS has barely seen any upstream work besides that of Edward Shishkin as a former Namesys developer that also took on Reiser4 (and now Reiser5) out-of-tree development following Hans Reiser's arrest and murder conviction. Shishkin has contributed fixes occasionally to ReiserFS but those are very rare while he has mostly been focused on Reiser4/Reiser5 that still have no clear trajectory at this point for going mainline without any major corporate backer.

Thus on Friday night fs_for_v5.18-rc1 was merged that goes ahead and deprecates ReiserFS. The plan is to treat it as deprecated and formally remove it from the mainline Linux kernel in 2025.