As part of updates to the older file-system drivers for Linux 6.6, the ReiserFS file-system is no longer marked as “Supported” but is officially treated as “Obsolete” within the Linux kernel.
The linux-fs merge for the Linux 6.6 cycle now treats ReiserFS as obsolete, the file-system long ago used by default on the likes of SUSE Linux.
Last year with Linux 5.18 ReiserFS was deprecated and now with it being obsolete, it will likely be dropped from the mainline Linux kernel within the next two to three years. Last year openSUSE Tumbleweed also ended ReiserFS support as one of the few distributions supporting it as an option.
The story of ReiserFS is a sad one – its creator, Hans Reiser, was charged with and convicted of the murder of his wife. The successor to ReiserFS, Reiser5, is still seeing sporadic development, but most likely won’t be mainlined any time soon.
ReiserFS…. Bad memories not only of Hans, but the File system. Many bad memories of fixing SVN repos that were hosted on RieserFS. If nothing else it taught me the value of having backups, archives of backups, and testing of backups.
There’s no excuse or lightening of the crime Hans committed but reading what they did to him… the really Fed him over with betrayal to the nth degree and I’m not entirely surprised that would really mess with most people’s heads you would hope not to the point of murder though.
That said I’m still kind of amazed they haven’t renamed Reiser5 so everyone could move on.
The Death of Ian Murdock is also tragic… but at least that project didn’t get socially blackballed despite it containing his name as well as an ex’s.
I used to use ReiserFS when I first started using gentoo because I liked the fact that it didn’t succumb to running out of inodes as easily as ext FSes did. I did loose data to it though due to HD failure at one point.
It’s so strange how everyone’s memories seem to be backwards. ReiserFS (3.x, the one we actually used) was abandoned by Reiser as soon as Namesys got it merged into Linux. It was good for specific use cases, but it had corner cases where its fsck could make things worse instead of better. And since Reiser4 required a reformat (ext2 -> ext3 was an in-place update), distros just moved on to ext3.
Reiser3 had already lost all its luster and goodwill by the time Hans murdered Nina.
Not sure what are you are refering to as being backwards with respect to my comment… yes it was reiserfs 3 that I used and yeah the fsck sucked? What is your point?
“That said I’m still kind of amazed they haven’t renamed Reiser5 so everyone could move on.
The Death of Ian Murdock is also tragic… but at least that project didn’t get socially blackballed despite it containing his name as well as an ex’s.”
Reiser4 was already going nowhere. No one was going to pay for development, and it wasn’t getting merged in-tree. Apparently, what funding they had was a DARPA grant. Reiser3 was effectively obsolete. What makes you think the project was “socially blackballed”? In an alternate world where Hans didn’t kill Nina, I don’t see any difference for the adoption of future ReiserFS versions.
Good. No file system should be named after a convicted wife murderer.
Good what? They still haven’t renamed it…
Regardless of what he did, it’s still HIS filesystem. So, of course it would be named after him because he created it & he named it. No, they’re not going to rename it. And honestly, there’s no reason to bother with it at this point. Even if he hadn’t killed his wife, it’s likely that no new version of his filesystem would have ever ended up in the kernel source.