Saturday, April 28, 2012

HowTo: Enable reiserfs support on CentOS 6.2 and SL6.2

By default RHEL clones such as CentOS and Scientific Linux don't come with ReiserFS filesystem support.

However the ELRepo repository has the kmod-reiserfs package which provides the much needed kernel modules. As such enabling ReiserFS support on RHEL/CentOS/SL 6.2 consists of adding the ELRepo repository, installing the kernel module for ReiserFS and the reiserfs-utils package which provide tools for creating and repairing ReiserFS filesystems.

The required steps are:
  1. $ su
  2. # rpm --import http://elrepo.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-elrepo.org
  3. # rpm -Uvh http://elrepo.org/elrepo-release-6-4.el6.elrepo.noarch.rpm
  4. # yum update
  5. # yum install kmod-reiserfs reiserfs-utils
  6. # modprobe reiserfs

Now you can have GNOME Nautilus mount ReiserFS partitions by simply clicking on the partitions and providing root's password.

It should be noted that the reiserfs-utils is also available in the CentOS-extras repository however the version on ELRepo is newer. If you have priorities associated with third party repositories take this into account.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Worked great! Thank you!!

tangram said...

No problem. Glad to helped ;)

Dedanna said...

Hi, I'm having an issue with this... unknown file system with grub rescue on boot. More here.

Any clues what to do? Thanks.

tangram said...

Hi,

The problems you're having are outside the scope of this HowTo. I'd suggest seeking help on CentOS forums or mailing list.

Still... you're enabling reiserfs for the LiveDVD environment. The installed system isn't capable of reading reiserfs because reiserfs module isn't part of CentOS stock kernel.

I'd approach the problem differently and probably deal with the CentOS install first with everything on /. Afterwards I'd enable reiserfs support and mount the old home.

Regards,
tangram.

Dedanna said...

The link posted is to the forum, but they generally seem to take ages to respond to anything.

I guess I will have to see what else can be done.

Thanks for your reply.

Anonymous said...

What version of ReiserFS does RHEL 6.2 support?

I need to user ReiserFS v3.6 or later preferably.

tangram said...

Hi,

Nothing like installing the kmod and checking modinfo's output:

# modinfo reiserfs
filename: /lib/modules/2.6.32-279.19.1.el6.x86_64/weak-updates/reiserfs/reiserfs.ko
license: GPL
author: Hans Reiser
description: ReiserFS journaled filesystem
srcversion: 7D4D774BBAB952F5771B639
depends:
vermagic: 2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64 SMP mod_unload modversions

As for the version of the filesystem itself check the kernel's archive.

Regards,
Ricardo Jesus

Unknown said...

Worked great! Thank you!

tangram said...

Renato, obrigado pelo feedback.

:)