Early last year, developers at SUSE submitted a v2 patch to the Linux kernel that marks the ReiserFS file system as deprecated and will officially remove it from the kernel in 2025. The reason for the removal is primarily that the filesystem has not been active for over a decade and is unlikely to be used again in production use cases with modern kernels.

For similar reasons, developers recently began to focus on discussing whether the Journaled File-System (JFS) file system should continue to be retained in the kernel.

Kernel developer Christoph Hellwig said on the mailing list:

We have deprecated ReiserFS a while ago and plan to remove it. Looking at the code in JFS, I wonder if we should do the same. While JFS isn’t as sophisticated as ReiserFS, it’s also seen very little usage and has never been the default filesystem in any major distribution.

In 1990, IBM developed the JFS file system for AIX 3.1 (which allows faster recovery in the event of a system crash or power outage), and the second-generation implementation was ported to Linux after it was open-sourced. So JFS has existed in Linux for more than two decades.

As the developer Christoph Hellwig said, JFS is not widely used, nor is it used by any famous Linux distribution for the default root file system, and file systems such as EXT4 / XFS / Btrfs / F2FS are also more popular in comparison. Has a performance advantage.

The future fate of JFS may be the same as ReiserFS, first deprecated, and then finally removed from the kernel.