Future of reiserfs in Tumbleweed (and beyond)
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
On 8/5/22 13:00, Jeff Mahoney wrote:
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.
I forgot to mention one important thing. It is also scheduled for removal from the upstream kernel in 2025: commit eb103a51640ee32ab01c51e13bf8fca211f25f61 Author: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Date: Fri Feb 25 13:54:45 2022 +0100 reiserfs: Deprecate reiserfs 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. Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20220225125445.29942-1-jack@suse.cz Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> -Jeff -- Jeff Mahoney Director, SUSE Labs Data & Performance
On 8/5/22 12:00, Jeff Mahoney wrote:
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.
It was in the early 2000's when I switched to SuSE because it had reiserfs. Having come from a DEC VAX environment with a journaling file system, I found the delay in fsck'ing a 20 MB disk with ext2 after a system crash to be excruciating. I quickly looked for one on Linux and ended up in this community. That said, when ext3 became available I switched to it, and ext4 in turn. As a result, I will not miss reiserfs when it goes away. In fact, I generate my own kernels and do not enable it in any of them. Larry
participants (2)
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Jeff Mahoney -
Larry Finger