[Frost1x]

ReiserFS is a conversational litmus test I like to casually and indirectly name drop in technical interview discussions surrounding the world of Linux, file systems, and storage to fish and see if someone actually had been actively working in the domain circa 2000ish when there was a lot of hype and criticism bubbling surrounding performance with large sets of small files.

Admittedly, it's not a great signal if the candidate hadn't heard of it or used it depending on their career length because plenty avoided it and happily lived in other FS worlds or avoided certain hype, but it's a fairly good positive signal if someone actually starts talking about it knowledgably in some way regardless of it on positive or critical notes--just have to keep survivorship and confirmation biases actively in mind when weighing these things.

[ericbarrett]

Sadly, I don't think this is a good signal for anything anymore except being past a certain age and having been around Linux at the time. ReiserFS hasn't been relevant for fifteen years, as during its heydey it was quite unstable and after the incident development stopped completely. I say this as somebody who was in the storage industry in the early 2000s and worked with an engineer who personally knew Hans Reiser.

[stevekemp]

I can almost see that being useful, but at the same time I'd be more curious about the current knowledge somebody possessed than stuff from back in the day. It's also a bit of an (accidental?) age-test.

It's like asking about Pamela Jones, from Groklaw, and her red dress. Fun trivia, but it tells you nothing about a person's current technical skills (or even their past ones!), just their ability to remember random names/facts, and excludes newer/younger staff.

Back then reiserfs was too new, and therefore not something I'd consider deploying to production systems. These days? Obsolete in practice. So I guess there would be many like me who have a vague memory that it was gonna be cool, with plugins and stuff, but who never actually used it or tried it.

(Maybe it's different if you're interviewing/grilling somebody for a very FS/Storage-heavy NAS-producing company, but there I'd expect conservatism to be highly appreciated?)

[wink]

Absolutely. If you asked me to name current and historical filesystems on Linux I would 100% be able to name reiserfs - but features? Nope, not a single one. I was kinda surprised by the sibling comments that it has been THAT long. When it was actively in the news it was still unstable but promising. Then at some point it hadn't been mentioned anymore for a while and then we had ext4 and xfs and btrfs. So even as a linux user (and admin) I don't think it's anything anyone must know.

[cogman10]

Why not update to more modern FSes like BTRFS, XFS, or ZFS? BTRFS, in particular, is pretty heavily inspired by Reiser.

I'm not entirely sure what's gained by asking a candidate about FAT16.

[hulitu]

Is XFS stable ? I tried reiserfs, jfs and xfs at the beginning and stuck with jfs because reiserfs would eat a lot of processor power and xfs would not run fsck when the power got interrupted which resulted in a corrupted filesystem.

[cogman10]

It was added to the kernel in 2004. It's stable. That being said, IMO, BTRFS and ZFS are better file systems.