And, in Red Hat 7.1 (not EL) days, it was a supported journaled filesystem.  Before EXT3 was supported.

EXT3, once became supported, had the advantage that many of the tools that supported EXT2 could work better with it.

On 7/19/17, 3:30 PM, "Konstantin Olchanski" <[log in to unmask] on behalf of [log in to unmask]> wrote:

    On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 09:24:44PM -0400, Paul Robert Marino wrote:
    > 
    > OK well reiserfs is actually EXT2 with a journal slapped on top of it just like EXT3 so you can try mounting it as readonly EXT2 though admittedly I haven't tried it it should work in theory, but certainly can't hurt if you try it in read only mode.
    > 
    
    
    Sheesh. The guy goes to jail and today nobody even remembers what he was all about.
    
    reiserfs is not EXT2, not XFS, not flash-fs, not ZFS, not AFS, not ...
    
    It was much better than all of them in exactly 1 way - it was built
    to efficiently handle large number of small files.
    
    With reiserfs:
    
    a) a "hello world!" file does not occupy 4k of disk space (tail packing)
    b) "rm -rf /" takes 1 second (try to delete some files from ZFS, lucky ot be done by tomorrow).
    c) "ls -ltR /" does not take 10 days
    
    It was very good while it lasted.
    
    Of course today everybody wants checksums, and dedup, and built-in raid,
    and snapshots, and ... and so reiserfs joins the Dodo bird, the steam-powered airplane,
    and the home made icecream as fond memory of last year's trees were taller,
    grass was greener.
    
    
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser
    
    K.O.