In a letter from SUSE Labs, Jeff Mahoney announces that the next release of openSUSE, 10.2, will no longer use the ReiserFS filesystem as the default filesystem. They are going to use ext3 filesystem insted, as the default filesystem: "We've been using ReiserFS as our default installation file system for the last 6-7 years now, and it's served us well in that time. Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with it, some purely technical, some more related to maintenance. I'll outline a few of the larger issues and offer my solution as a conclusion."

Jeff Mahoney says that ReiserFS has serious scalability problems and serious performance problems with extended attributes and ACLs. Also ReiserFS has a small and shrinking development community, and ReiserFS v3 is a dead end: "Hans has been pushing reiser4 for years now and declared Reiser3 in maintenance mode. Any changes that aren't bug fixes are met with violent resistance. Reiser4 is not an incremental update and requires a reformat, which is unreasonable for most people. Reiser3 lacks a number of features that other file systems either have or are adding soon, such as extents and growth beyond current limits. Since it's in maintenance mode, that's unlikely to change. I view reiser4 as an interesting research file system, but that's about as far as it goes. I've been unimpressed with its stability so far. I don't know how advanced the recovery tools are yet, but I suspect that the complexity of the format and the ability to essentially define the format on-the-fly with plugins will make a useful fsck extremely difficult."

So, SUSE Labs has found the solution for replacing an aging file system, and that isn't to switch to a brand new unproven file system, but rather a proven one with a clear upgrade path. That file system is ext3.

Ext3's performance in some situations may not be on par with Reiser3, but it scales better and has a much larger development community out there. Also, Ext3 has a clear upgrade path. There is quite a bit of interest in the community in improving ext3, and ext4 is already under development.

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