Hi folks -
When we introduced reiserfs in SUSE products over 20 years ago, it was a
cutting edge file system that brought the protection of journaling to
Linux for the first time. In 2006, I proposed moving away from it in
openSUSE as the default file system, citing a small and shrinking
developer community. These days, while I am technically the maintainer
of the reiserfs userspace project upstream. Practically, it's abandoned
and I haven't touched it in over 5 years. The kernel implementation
gets attention only when updating a common subsystem requires it. It
has none of the resiliency features that we've come to expect from
modern file systems, and that includes the ability to craft file system
images that could result in system crash or possibly compromise.
It's time to let reiserfs go from openSUSE entirely.
So, I propose:
- Removing the reiserfs package from Tumbleweed immediately (and fixing
any fallout caused by removing libreiserfscore),
- Disable the kernel implementation immediately.
I recognize that there may be people out there with disks containing
reiserfs file systems. If these are in active use, I would seriously
encourage migrating to something actively maintained. If these are
sitting on a shelf for archival purposes, GRUB ships with a fuse
frontend for all of its file system drivers, including reiserfs. It's
not fast but it's enough for data access.
-Jeff
--
Jeff Mahoney
Director, SUSE Labs Data & Performance