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Those following the evolution of the Reiser4 filesystem will be interested in learning that it has become "fairly stable for average users", so much so that Namesys is soon planning to push patches [story] to 2.6 kernel maintainer Andrew Morton [interview]. Once the two remaining known bugs are fixed, the warnings against using reiser4 on a production system will likely be removed. Hans Reiser explains:
"We have one NFS related bug remaining, and one mmap all of memory related bug (and performance issue) that you can hit using iozone. We will fix both of these in next week's snapshot, they were both multi-day bug fixes. When they are fixed, unless users/distros find bugs next week we will submit it for inclusion in the -mm and then the official kernel."
Hans goes on to note, "We need a lot more real user testers, because we have run out of scripts that can crash it, and there are distros that would like to ship it soon." Read on for the full thread, including links to the latest snapshot and changelog.
A brief thread on the lkml discussed whether or not Reiser4 would soon be stable enough to be merged into the 2.6 kernel as an 'experimental filesystem'. When it was suggested that this might be overly optimistic, that the filesystem may best go into the 2.7 development kernel [forum] first, Hans Reiser disagreed, "I don't think it is vastly optimistic, I hope we can send something in next month". He went on to explain, "we will have something we think is appropriate for inclusion as an experimental feature very soon now. Because our test scripts have become much more sophisticated, it means more when we say we cannot crash it, and it will go from experimental to stable faster than V3 did. I won't predict how fast."
Jens Axboe, maintainer of the block layer and several CD-ROM drivers, suggested that it would be unwise to merge the code so quickly, instead preferring a much lengthier period of user testing. He explains, "I don't doubt you have great testing scripts, but nothing beats real life testing." During a discussion in late August [story], 2.6 kernel maintainer Andrew Morton [interview] indicated that he would be willing to merge Reiser4 into his -mm patchset [howto].
Following Andrew Morton's [interview] recent posting of 2.6.0-test4-mm2 [forum], Christian Axelsson asked, "Is there any work [being] done on getting reiser4 into mm? I havent tried it myself yet but I've heard of colliding code in [the] scheduler". Andrew replied that a merging effort hasn't been made, but that he'd be interested in making it happen in a month or two so long as the namesys developers were willing to commit to providing him with up-to-date patches. Hans Reiser offered:
"We would be happy to make that commitment, and happy to switch from creating snapshots every week to pushing to you and linking to you from our website. Several people have asked for this besides Christian."
In other words, it looks like -mm users will soon have easy access to the resier4 filesystem.
