The out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system driver has been updated with compatibility for the latest Linux 4.14 stable series. Besides reworking the code to run on Linux 4.14, this controversial file-system has also added support for Zstd file-system compression.

Linux 4.14 introduced Zstd support in the mainline kernel and wired it in for SquashFS and Btrfs. Our Btrfs Zstd benchmarks have been promising for transparent file-system compression compared to the other supported algorithms. Reiser4 has now picked up Zstd compression as an eventual replacement to their Gzip compression support.

Those using the Reiser4 file-system in some capacity can now safely upgrade to the Linux 4.12 kernel.

Edward Shishkin has updated this out-of-tree file-system for the Linux 4.12 kernel so it can be built with the latest mainline stable release.

For those that haven't yet switched to Btrfs, ZFS On Linux, or running EXT4/XFS but holding out hope for Reiser4, this out-of-tree file-system code has been updated for Linux 4.9.

Reiser4 was released for Linux 4.9.0 last weekend but then a revised patch series came out three days ago to fix some problems with this port to 4.9. With the new Reiser4 patches built against Linux 4.9.1, all should be well if you want to use this experimental file-system on the newest Linux kernel.

Edward Shishkin, one of the last remaining Reiser4 developers and the one who has been leading this out-of-tree file-system the past few years, has implemented logical volumes support with support for mirrors (in effect, RAID 0) and failover support at the file-system level.

Shishkin quietly announced on Sunday, "Reiser4 will support logical (compound) volumes. For now we have implemented the simplest ones - mirrors. As a supplement to existing checksums it will provide a failover - an important feature, which will reduce number of cases when your volume needs to be repaired by fsck."