Versus ext4: online resize, better at handling large directories. Versus xfs: better at handling power loss/crashes (no "trailing zeroes problem"), reiserfsck is not 100% reliable but it can sometimes save you whereas if you reach the same situation with xfs then you have 0% chance of recovering your data. Versus btrfs: more mature (isn't btrfs still tagged as experimental?), same situation wrt fsck.

I use ZFS where I can, but for root filesystems on linux machines reiser still seems like the best tradeoff.

> Versus xfs: better at handling power loss/crashes (no "trailing zeroes problem")

I heard they fixed it in 2012. Actually there have been a lot of developments in XFS since 2011, I'm not really interested in filesystems but you should have a look at it again if you're interested.

Ext4 seems to support online growing resize (although needs offline to shrink). Didn't ext3 or ext4 also add directory hashing?

reiserfsck used to be a game of russian roulette -- it either sort-of works and you can mount your filesystem, or it eats all your data.

I can't say I'd trust my data on it these days.

It's a gamble sure. But if you get into the same situation with XFS or btrfs there's no gamble, just guaranteed data loss.

XFS is not as bad as it once was, but I don't use either of those anyway.

no I after dealing with it I would recommend avoiding it like the plague. However with several petabytes deployed at remote sites its not a simple matter to up and abandon it.