I have used Reiser 3 on Slackware Linux for years and am very satisfied of it.

But now, as Slackware 13 has been released I'm wondering : should I still use ReiserFS for / and /home ?

My main concern is maintainability : does somebody know how it is maintained after the end of Namesys and as Hans Reiser can't work on it any more ?

Secondly, I'm using a laptop for everyday tasks (mostly desktop-like, not server, battery powered when on the move). Does somebody know something about energy consumption of ReiserFS compared to, say, ext3 or ext4 (journalized file systems only) ?

Thirdly, I plan to install Slackware on a logical volume (using LVM), with may-be my /home partition encrypted. Should I expect any problem with ReiserFS for that ?

Fourthly did any former ReiserFS user notice a major performance enhancement (i.e. system being overall obviously faster) after having switched to another journalized file system (laptop or desktop usage) ?

Thanks for your answers

PS Reiser 4 is not an option here as it is not included in Slackware and I won't consider using btrfs for now.

I suspect that someone will pick up ReiserFS, but the number of people working on it was always small: I seem to remember that there were just 2 at Suse, and that distro's lost interest.

Reiser said he'd designed to exploit fast, modern CPUs, so presumably RFS would be slower on a laptop (unless you have a very up-market one). Ext is generally considered a little slower, because it updates the journaling more frequently. But how fast do you need to be on a laptop? I suspect that if XFS (which is certainly very fast) and JFS are usually found on servers, there must be a reason.

Is it worth using LVM on a laptop? With only / and /home, it's not very likely that you will need to much alteration to sizes at a later date. If you do use LVM, RFS is compatible with it.

Thanks David. I do like to be able to resize easily / versus /home. And as I have already two partitions on my Lenovo Thinkpad T61 (one hidden for Thinkpad specific stuff and another one for Windows), if I add three (including one for swap) I end up having to set up an extended partition -- which I don't like, though I must admit it works. Or may be I could use a swap file instead of a swap partition.