Reiser4 File-System Is Still Ticking In 2019 - Now Updated For Linux 5.3 Compatibility

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 10 November 2019 at 04:41 PM EST. 17 Comments
LINUX STORAGE
While Linux 5.4 is rolling out in about two weeks, the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system has just been updated for Linux 5.3 support.

Edward Shishkin continues near single-handedly maintaining the out-of-tree Reiser4 code that at this point still has no apparent trajectory towards mainline. The former Namesys developer previously indicated it's unlikely to see Reiser4 merged unless there is a company backing it to get it through the review process for merging into mainline. While Reiser4 was quite promising for its early time, it's only getting more difficult with Reiser4 effectively stagnating for years now while SUSE/openSUSE continues backing Btrfs, Ubuntu increasingly investing in ZFS support, Red Hat developing Stratis, XFS continuing to be advanced by Red Hat and others as well, Google continuing to invest in the likes of EXT4/F2FS, and there also being Bcachefs and other open-source storage solutions that are more promising than Reiser4 in 2019. Nevertheless, the out-of-tree kernel patches continue to be updated.

The Reiser4 patch is out today for Linux 5.3 stable support. Besides re-basing the patch from Linux 5.2, this time around were additional changes for Linux 5.3 enabling the implicit fallthrough warning for the GCC compiler to uncover potential bugs / unexpected behavior within switch statements.

The Reiser4 Linux 5.3 support patch is available from SourceForge.
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