IPFire drops Reiser4 filesystem support

IPFire, the hardened Linux distribution for firewall appliances, was recently updated to IPFire 2.11 Core update 61 and along with the enhancements, the developers announced that they are ending support for the Reiser4 filesystem. Rarely found in the wild, Reiser4 is an advanced filesystem, and sequel to ReiserFS, which offers an efficient journalling system, plugin support (for metadata or encryption), disk-layout optimisation and transaction support.

Its creator, Hans Reiser, was convicted of murdering his wife and since his incarceration development of the filesystem is no longer supported by the Linux kernel developers and has not been merged with the mainline Linux kernel. One of the few distributions that made use of it, IPFire, has now decided that it is too difficult to keep its kernel synchronised with the Reiser4 development despite it being "one of the best filesystems around". They are requesting that any users who make use of it migrate to another supported filesystem. Users who have Reiser4 filesystems will see a notice on the index page of the web interface if they need to reinstall; they will then need to backup and reinstall that system, a process the developers estimate will take around thirty minutes.

Apart from the Reiser4 warning, the IPFire developers have improved their implementation of OpenVPN with support for static routes, renamable connections and N2N connections displayed on the index page. On the connections page, it is now possible to see how much traffic has passed over a single connection and multicast traffic is highlighted. The build toolchain has also been updated and the PHP package has been updated to 5.3.14 for security reasons.

The GPLv2 licensed IPFire is available to download from the project's web site.

(djwm)