To what extent has ReiserFS's popularity been lessened by Hans Reiser? [closed]

Solution 1:

reiserfs is currently maintained upstream in the kernel. I found 4 changes in the 2.6.30 release notes. There are also efforts (which led to some of the 2.6.30 commits) to reduce the use of the Big Kernel Lock (BKL). The use of the BKL is a major bottleneck for reiserfs on Multicore systems and should show some performance gains by being nable to lock on just the superblock instead. Novell & SuSE have continued supporting the file system for their enterprise product so it's not dead yet. Also, it's often not 'officially' supported by many of the distros, but you can for instance install the latest Fedora release on ReiserFS (with installer boot params linux selinux=0 reiserfs).

As far as Reiser4, it is currently in Andrew Morton's -mm tree and development continues led by Edward Shishkin (a former Namesys employee). In a mid-May email on reiserfs-devel, Edward estimated that the requisite changes for merging it into Linus' tree of the kernel might get done in the August/September time frame.

People seem to have moved on to getting excited about ext4/btrfs/ZFS, so reiser4 going into the mainline may be more of a victory for its supporters than anything else, but at the same time if it's better than the other available file systems then I'm sure it will regain popularity.

Solution 2:

The Wikipedia article says that development has stopped on ReiserFS v4, so I would take that to mean that you're at the mercy of your host OS's support for ReiserFS v3 and the year 2038, whichever comes first.

You're right, it is a very subjective question. Especially if you're trying to gauge its popularity (which I think is a pointless exercise).