Reiser4 Updated For Linux 4.14 & Introduces Zstd Compression Support

The out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system driver has been updated with compatibility for the latest Linux 4.14 stable series. Besides reworking the code to run on Linux 4.14, this controversial file-system has also added support for Zstd file-system compression.

Linux 4.14 introduced Zstd support in the mainline kernel and wired it in for SquashFS and Btrfs. Our Btrfs Zstd benchmarks have been promising for transparent file-system compression compared to the other supported algorithms. Reiser4 has now picked up Zstd compression as an eventual replacement to their Gzip compression support.

Reiser4 is not using compression by default but the Zstd support on Linux 4.14+ can be enabled by using the -o compress=zstd1 mount option when paired with reiser4progs 1.2.0 or newer.

The latest Reiser4 file-system patch for Linux 4.14 can be downloaded from SourceForge.