Welcome to the Reiser4 Wiki, the Wiki for users and developers of the ReiserFS and Reiser4 filesystems.
For now, most of the documentation is just a snapshot of the old Namesys site (archive.org, 2007-09-29).
There was also a Reiser4 Wiki (archive.org, 2007-07-06) once on pub.namesys.com.
Reiser4 Howto
Reiser4
As reiser4 is not in mainline yet, we have to apply the right patch to get this working:
$ wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/edward/reiser4/reiser4-for-2.6/reiser4-for-2.6.30.patch.bz2 $ wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/edward/reiser4/reiser4-for-2.6/reiser4-for-2.6.30.patch.bz2.sign $ gpg --verify reiser4-for-2.6.30.patch.bz2.sign reiser4-for-2.6.30.patch.bz2 gpg: Signature made Tue 23 Jun 2009 12:43:47 AM CEST using DSA key ID 517D0F0E gpg: Good signature from "Linux Kernel Archives Verification Key <ftpadmin@kernel.org>" $ cd /usr/src/linux $ bzip2 -dc ~/reiser4-for-2.6.30.patch.bz2 | patch -p1
Now enable CONFIG_REISER4_FS and build (and install) your kernel. Reboot, and don't forget to
report bugs if things go wrong. Even more important: don't forget your backups before messing with your filesystems!
ReiserFS
Since reiserfs is in mainline, just enable the following options in your kernel .config:
CONFIG_REISERFS_FS CONFIG_REISERFS_FS_XATTR (optional) CONFIG_REISERFS_FS_POSIX_ACL (optional) CONFIG_REISERFS_FS_SECURITY (optional)
Todays distributions should have this options enabled already, no need to build your kernel. However, not every Linux distribution supports reiserfs. But if you disregard your distribution's recommended settings, you'll probably know what you're doing anyway.
Booting off a ReiserFS/Reiser4 partition
As far as the reader is informed, booting off a ReiserFS partition is fully supported by LiLo or GRUB.
For Reiser4, LiLo is known to work out of the box. To use GRUB with a Reiser4 partition, a few more steps are needed.