Where can you use ReiserFS?

There seems to be much confusion amongst new OpenAFS administrators about when and where they can use ReiserFS. This document attempts to describe supported uses, and explain why the others are unsupported.

Supported: Vice partitions on namei-based fileservers

Why: Namei-based fileservers store volumes in regular files on the vice partitions. No meta-data is stored in the inodes of these files.

Unsupported: Vice partitions on inode-based fileservers

Why: Inode-based fileservers access volumes directly via inode, and sneakily stuff bits of volume metadata into portions of the inode structure. Since ReiserFS does not have persistent inodes, this process will not work.

Unsupported: Cache partitions on OpenAFS clients

Why: The cache manager operates directly on filesystem inodes. ReiserFS does not have persistent inodes.