Questions tagged [reiserfs]

ReiserFS is a general-purpose, journaling filesystem supported by Linux since 2.4.1. It was written by a group at Namesys, headed by Hans Reiser.

ReiserFS has some important features:

• Filesystem journaling - as opposed to to the then current ext2
• Online Filesystem Growth
• Tail Packing - reduces filesystem fragmentation
• Optimized for small files

However, it also has some drawbacks:

• Use of the Big Kernel Lock (BKL) - limits filesystem operations to a single core
• Lack of a true defragmenter
• fsck can corrupt an already corrupted filesystem
• Lack of migration path - Reiser4 is not planned to be backward-compatable