Looking at btrfs

Bombastinator · March 9, 2020

So because of a recent Linus video I was looking at btrfs and noticed that while it was adopted by a bunch of major Linux distro s it was removed from red hat in 2018. Curious as to why. What is this OS particularly good for? I read the wiki and it was apparently designed to deal with issues Linux had with FS scalability.

Whats the scoop with this thing? What’s it good for?

Sir0Tek · March 9, 2020

This is all I know, but so far it didn't influence my position on using btrfs on home/data partitions in particular.

March 9, 2020

https://www.thegeekdiary.com/features-of-the-btrfs-filesystem/

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Features

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FAQ#Is_btrfs_stable.3F

btrfs isn't really considered production ready and is considered unstable by many.

There really has been no movement to finalize or prepare a production ready build.

Features are landing in various other file systems over time.

My only real issue was its inability to occasionally not be able to free allocated space in its metadata pool, this one can cause headaches sometimes. Can be time consuming to fix, especially on larger drives. This seems to be mostly a problem when your are dealing with a lot of data spread across several files in a short time span.

Some Distros use it for its snapshot and sub volume features.

WereCatf · March 9, 2020

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

Whats the scoop with this thing? What’s it good for?

Btrfs offers many of the same features as ZFS, like e.g. snapshots, built-in software RAID-features, copy-on-write, notification (and protection from, if using RAID) of silent bitrot and so on. Where it differs from ZFS and traditional RAID-systems is that you can use drives of different sizes and you can actually convert between different RAID-profiles on-the-fly -- a feature I have had plenty of use for as I am on a tight budget and have to build my systems slowly part-by-part over time.

I've been using Btrfs for like 8 years now or so, and am a happy camper.

Sauron · March 9, 2020

11 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

So because of a recent Linus video I was looking at btrfs and noticed that while it was adopted by a bunch of major Linux distro s it was removed from red hat in 2018. Curious as to why. What is this OS particularly good for? I read the wiki and it was apparently designed to deal with issues Linux had with FS scalability.

Whats the scoop with this thing? What’s it good for?

Red Hat removed it because it's been in development for a while and it still doesn't have native encryption.

If you don't care about that, BTRFS is good for software RAID 1 or 0 configuration with experimental support for RAID 5 and 6. And it has many of the cool features ZFS has plus a couple of its own as @WereCatf said.