Reiser5 Stabilizing Its Logical Volume Functionality

This New Year's Eve will mark one year since the announcement of the in-development Reiser5 file-system. While the outlook for getting Reiser5 upstreamed into the mainline kernel remains murky given the out-of-tree status of Reiser4, Edward Shishkin does continue advancing this latest Reiser file-system iteration.

Since last year's initial Reiser5 announcement, more features continue to be ironed out for this evolution of Reiser4. The latest Reiser5 functionality hitting a point of stability is its logical volume management.

In aiming to make Reiser5 logical volume manager "flexible and simple" some of the recent changes include no balancing by default, removal completion, volume balancing is always defined and can be launched at any moment, and a balancing procedure has been added to restore regular distribution of data on the volume.

In announcing this latest logical volume management work, Shishkin also released updated patches of the Reiser5 file-system driver kernel code as well as the "reiser4progs" in user-space for handling Reiser4/Reiser5 operations. Those updated patches can be found via SourceForge.

More details on the logical volume management work for Reiser5 via this mailing list post. It will be interesting to see where Reiser5 leads in 2021.