Reiserfs going away in 2025 [LWN.net]

This proposed patch from Jan Kara tells the whole story:

Reiserfs is relatively old filesystem and its development has ceased quite some years ago. Linux distributions moved away from it towards other filesystems such as btrfs, xfs, or ext4. To reduce maintenance burden on cross filesystem changes (such as new mount API, iomap, folios ...) let's add a deprecation notice when the filesystem is mounted and schedule its removal to 2025.

This change has not yet been merged into the mainline, but there does not appear to be any real opposition to it.

to post comments

Reiserfs going away in 2025

Posted May 11, 2023 15:10 UTC (Thu) by Dikonov (guest, #165056) [Link] (3 responses)

This suggestion is outrageous and downright stupid. The proposed change is a barbaric destruction of a well tested and working feature. It would cripple the Linux kernel and bring suffering to many people including me.

Permanently removing a filesystem is extremely harmful because it blocks access to archive and backup data that use it and should never be changed. Archive media must remain accessible even after 100 years and stay accessible regardless of the current whims of fashion.

I, for instance, have been using reiserfs for many years and it has always been rock solid and performed exceptionally well. I have hundreds of terabytes of data stored at reiserfs media and partitions. It is impossible to copy all the data into the same disks but using EXT, because the data will require more disk space and will not fit any more.

Please, stop the modern Herostratuses!

Reiserfs going away in 2025

Posted May 11, 2023 15:29 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (1 responses)

This filesystem is unmaintained. The Linux kernel moves forward and work is needed to keep the filesystem working.
You are free to become maintainer of reiserfs. Or pay someone to maintain it.

Reiserfs going away in 2025

Posted Jun 17, 2025 14:47 UTC (Tue) by martinwguy2 (guest, #177905) [Link]

Reiserfs is (or was when I ran tests on all journalling filesystems in 2010)
the fastest in most scenarios, the most compact with many small files and
has proved since then to be the most reliable (unlike ext3 which, if the
underlying ext2 gets corrupted in certain ways, dies along with it).
Hats off!

I've run some tests reverting the change in question and it reverts cleanly
and compiles in 6.13, 6.14 and 6.15, and in 6.16-rc2 there was a single conflict
in `tools/testing/selftests/filesystems/statmount/statmount_test.c` due to
some rather patch-unfriendly reformatting of a list of items to 80 columns.

So the idea that there was some change that reiserfs code couldn't overcome is bogus,
and I am happy to step up to maintain it should that happen (I've been hacking kernels
since 4.2BSD in 1985).

https://codeberg.org/martinwguy/reiserfs

Reiserfs going away in 2025

Posted May 12, 2023 19:20 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> Permanently removing a filesystem is extremely harmful because it blocks access to archive and backup data

You can download an older kernel, boot it in a VM and use it to work with the archival/backup data.