next development release once we get 2.4 out the door.

Will there be any Journal File Systems like ReiserFS included in the

next kernel?

ReiserFS is probably going to be part of the standard source base for 2.4.

Partly it's also because of PR. For most new features I'd say that it's

not in the code base right now so it won't be in 2.4.0. The question that

has been dogging Linux for the past 4 years is the lack of a journal file

system. That's one of the reasons I'll put it in plus the fact that SuSE

has been doing a really good job of showing that it's stable in production

environments.

We'll probably have ReiserFS included if not the others. That's the one

that a lot of people are actually using in production environments. I

haven't decided yet if I will make it part of 2.4.0 or gradually kind of

get it into 2.4 during the 2.4 time frame. That's likely to happen.

IBM and SuSE are going to make an announcement about SuSE version of

Linux with a journal filesystem, ReiserFS. Will this be SuSE specific?

No, it will not be specific to SuSE. This is probably the filesystem

that is going to be standard in 2.4.0. What's SuSE has been doing is that

they've been actively supporting the author of ReiserFS. SuSE has been

testing it out and they've had this brewing for a long time. They're

basically showing that they've got a journal filesystem. If the power goes

down some place then it's no big deal. Here again you see that there's a

lot happening in Linux outside the embedded device space.

Where does file journaling come from ? Is it an open source group or

a commercial group ?

Actually all of the above. ReiserFS was a pretty new approach to

doing file systems. Not just journaling. It makes a lot of changes from the

standard UNIX file systems. That's been open source for a long time. But

there's also SGI XFS. There's also ext3fs, which is also open source. IBM

JFS journal file system is also available. But ReiserFS is probably the

one which has already been used in production environments for some time.

Which of these will be the default filesystem (XFS, JFS, ReiserFS)?

In the end ext2 is the default for a while yet. This is another issue.

People have choice. This is the kind of issue where most people don't even

have to care. They all look pretty much the same to the user. Just have

different performance factors. Machine goes down, whether they're