The future of Reiser4 was raised on the lkml, with the filesystem's creator, Hans Reiser [interview], awaiting his May 7'th trial [story]. Concerns that the filesystem wasn't being maintained were laid to rest when Andrew Morton [interview] stated, "the namesys engineers continue to maintain reiser4 and I continue to receive patches for it." He further added, "the namesys guys are responsive and play well with others." As to why the filesystem hasn't yet been merged into the 2.6 kernel, Andrew explained, "to get it unstuck we'd need a general push, get people looking at and testing the code, get the vendors to have a serious think about it, etc. We could do that - it'd require that the namesys people (and I) start making threatening noises about merging it, I guess." He then made joking reference to the recent debate regarding the new CPU schedulers [story], "or we could move all the reiser4 code into kernel/sched.c - that seems to get people fired up."

Namesys developer and author of the Reiser4 encryption and compression plugins, Edward Shiskin, offered some updates. Replying to some comments about the need to remove plugins from the Reiser4 code he explained, "the popular opinion that plugins make more sense in the VFS is a great delusion, as plugins are entities related to reiser4 disk layouts." In an earlier thread it had been suggested that the plugins were misnamed and would be better called an internal abstraction layer [story]. Edward went on to note, "currently there are two namesys employees working [on Reiser4] mostly on enthusiasm." He linked to a wiki page listing known issues with the code needing to be fixed before it's likely to be merged into the 2.6 kernel, "the main issues here are xattrs and support for blocksize != pagesize. I think that adding xattrs will take ~1 month of full-time working. Not sure about blocksize support." When it was noted that other filesystems have already been merged without support for either of these features, Edward said that they'd lower their priority and finish up with the other remaining issues left on the old todo list and resume the merge discussion at that time.

With Namesys founder Hans Reiser [interview] recently arrested as the prime suspect in the disappearance of his estranged wife, a brief thread on the lkml discussed the future of ReiserFS. Alan Cox [interview] pointed out that, "reiserfs is written by a team of people at Namesys, and particularly with reiserfs3 people at SuSE and elsewhere as well."

Alexander Lyamin, listed on the Namesys website as their "hostmaster and sysadmin", noted that the team was "rather shaken and stressed at the moment". He confirmed that ReiserFS 3.6 is currently in maintenance mode, then continued to discuss Reiser4, "we are still going through revisions, thanks to [Andrew Morton]. Chunking out patches, fixing issues and generally cleaning the house." He explained that this was the short term plan, for at least the next 6 months. Regarding the future he noted it depends on the outcome of the trial, "if it goes [the] way we hope it will go. Well... We will do fine. If it goes bad. That is where it becomes tricky. We will try to appoint a proxy to run Namesys business."