Namesys

» see namesys.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Around 2001 there was a real argument about Linux filesystems and ReiserFS was one side of it. It journaled, so a machine that lost power came back in seconds instead of sitting through a full fsck, and it packed small files into the tree rather than burning a whole block on each one, which mattered when a maildir or a source tree meant tens of thousands of tiny files. It landed in the mainline kernel with Linux 2.4.1 in early 2001. SUSE made it the default and kept it there until 2006, and Linspire shipped it too.

The company behind it was Namesys, working out of Oakland, California. The domain was serving documentation by November 2000 and the California corporation was registered in 2004, though the filesystem work goes back years earlier. Funding came from an unusual mix for a filesystem shop: DARPA money on one side and Linspire on the other. Staff included contract developers in Russia, which was how a project this size got built by an outfit this small.

Reiser4, the successor, was the ambitious one. It treated the filesystem as a plugin-driven database, with atomic transactions and a namespace in which a file could also behave like a directory, and it was submitted for kernel inclusion repeatedly from 2004 onward. The kernel maintainers kept saying no, partly on code-quality grounds and partly because Reiser had a documented habit of arguing with anyone who reviewed his work. It was never merged.

Then on 3 September 2006 Nina Reiser, Hans Reiser's estranged wife and the mother of their two children, disappeared in Oakland. He was arrested that October, tried through 2008, and convicted of first-degree murder in April. He later led investigators to her body as part of a plea arrangement that reduced the conviction to second-degree. Namesys had already stopped trading by then.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the filesystem ~

ReiserFS was genuinely good at the thing it claimed to be good at. Benchmarks on directories full of small files were not close, and for a few years around 2002 the sensible default answer to "which filesystem" on a mail server or a news spool was this one. It also had a reputation for eating data on bad hardware, mostly because its recovery tool could not tell the difference between a real filesystem tree and an image of one sitting inside a file, which made restoring a broken volume an exciting experience.

The distributions moved away for ordinary reasons. SUSE switched its default in 2006, and by the time ext4 arrived there was no benchmark left worth losing sleep over, so nobody was choosing ReiserFS for a new machine after about 2010. The installer dropdown still listed it for another decade after that, which is how a lot of people met the name at all.

~ the suspension ~

The company did not announce anything. namesys.com went unreachable in November 2007. In January 2008 a Namesys developer, Edward Shishkin, confirmed in an interview that commercial activity had stopped and the company had not been sold, despite Reiser's stated plan to sell it to pay for his defense. The State of California later listed the corporation as Suspended, which is the administrative way of saying a business exists on paper and files nothing.

There is no version of this grave where the product killed itself. The filesystem was in the mainline kernel, shipping on millions of machines, with a funded team and a successor in development. What ended it was a homicide, and the only reason it belongs in a list of dead software is that the man who held both the copyright and the payroll went to prison for it.

~ what the kernel did ~

Linux kept ReiserFS for seventeen more years with nobody upstream really maintaining it. Shishkin stayed with the code and carried Reiser4 forward out of tree, where it still lives. Reiser himself wrote a long letter from prison dated 26 November 2023, published to the kernel mailing list that January, apologizing for how he had dealt with the community and reviewing his own filesystem's technical decisions in the same document.

The formal end came quietly. ReiserFS was marked obsolete in Linux 5.18 in May 2022, and the deletion patch was merged in November 2024 for Linux 6.13, taking about 33,000 lines of code out of the tree. If you still have a volume formatted with it, Linux 6.12 is the last kernel that will mount it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »