Reiser4's Future
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
The future of Reiser4 was raised on the lkml, with the filesystem's creator, Hans Reiser [interview], awaiting his May 7'th trial. Concerns that the filesystem wasn't being maintained were laid to rest when Andrew Morton [interview] stated, "the namesys engineers continue to maintain reiser4 and I continue to receive patches for it." He further added, "the namesys guys are responsive and play well with others." As to why the filesystem hasn't yet been merged into the 2.6 kernel, Andrew explained, "to get it unstuck we'd need a general push, get people looking at and testing the code, get the vendors to have a serious think about it, etc. We could do that - it'd require that the namesys people (and I) start making threatening noises about merging it, I guess." He then made joking reference to the recent debate regarding the new CPU schedulers, "or we could move all the reiser4 code into kernel/sched.c - that seems to get people fired up."Here's a very interesting read from the lkml (Linux Kernel Mailing List). It discusses, rather in depth, the future of Reiser4 file system. There seem to be some problems to work out, but it looks as if maintenance on the system will be continued. However, as of right now, the developers are working purely on enthusiasm, so let's hope that doesn't ware off. After all, the Reiser4 file system showed quite a bit of promise. (You can check out some preliminary benchmarks of the ext2, ext3, and Resier4 file systems @ linux.inet.hr.) In any case, Reiser4 will not be included in the Linux kernel, not any time soon at least. Mainly, the debate goes on about what to do with some file system plugins currently found in Reiser4.
Read more @ Kernel Trap.
Note from the Nerd: Perhaps a rename would be appropriate? Well, can be decided after the trial (set for May 7).
