Reiser5 Would Be Turning Five Years Old But Remains Dead

It was on New Year’s Eve 2019 that Edward Shishkin announced the Reiser5 file-system as an evolution of the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system code. While next week would mark five years of Reiser5, the Reiser4/Reiser5 file-system still appears effectively dead and hasn’t been touched in quite a while.

Recalling the end-of-year Reiser5 announcement, with that anniversary approaching I was curious if there was anything new happening to the Reiser file-system code by Shishkin or others… But, nope. One month after ReiserFS was deleted from the mainline Linux kernel, there looks like no chances of Reiser4/Reiser5 rekindling to make it into the Linux kernel.

The Reiser4 SourceForge project where the Reiser4 and Reiser5 out-of-tree patches would be released haven’t been touched now in two and a half years. The last Reiser4 patch update was Reiser4 re-based for the Linux 5.16 kernel… Now we are currently on the Linux 6.13 upstream cycle. The Reiser5 patch releases have also not been touched since 2022.

Shishkin’s Reiser4 GitHub repository that he was using as the upstream kernel code for Reiser4 also hasn’t been touched now in two years.

So at this stage it looks unlikely seeing any new developments around Reiser4/Reiser5 for what will be the five year anniversary of the Reiser5 announcement.