I have been meaning to blog on this for weeks but just never got around to it. Today I had a call and that reminded me. On October 10th Hans Reiser was taken into custody by Oakland, CA authorities on suspicion of murdering his wife. Hans Reiser is the developer of the popular Linux file system ReiserFS. Based on this Novell SuSE Linux have announced that they will move away from ReiserFS to the ext3 file system. Novell claims that the move to ext3 is prompted by stability issues associated with Reiser4 and that ext3 will soon match the performance of ReiserFS. One has to wonder if the fact that Hans Reiser is on trial for the murder of his wife played a part in this decision – If convicted Hans may have nothing to do but work on the code, does anyone know what the computers are like in the California penal system? 🙂 More interesting to me and a little know or unadvertised fact is that the EMC Centera (great EMC Centera internals presentation) product leverages the ReiserFS, a move away from ReiserFS may not be as easy for EMC. For those of you who need validation of Centera’s use of the ReiserFS maybe this thread will help. EMC aquired the Cetera technology from Brussels, Belgium based FilePool NV in April 2001, the acquisition was reported as cash deal valued at less than 50 million dollars (aka – a home run!).

The Hans Reiser pre-trial commenced this Monday, Hans has entered a plea of not guilty. ReiserFS developent is obviously stalled for the time being.

Read more about the Hans Reiser story here.