Btrfs

Saganist

Anyone tried this FS ?

Looks really useful and could be the future FS for Linux..

Khannie

I remember there being a big hullaballoo about it about 12 or 18 months ago but at the time it wasn't stacking up to expectations. I'm a bit split on the notion of another FS. On one hand I think ext3/4 are perfectly good and widely supported now. On the other hand I think "free performance gains are obviously delightful".

LiamOSullivan

I'm not a massive FS-guru, but a lot of threads on the Gentoo boards have been putting me off trying it. Here's one:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-834065.html

Saganist

Khannie wrote: »

I remember there being a big hullaballoo about it about 12 or 18 months ago but at the time it wasn't stacking up to expectations. I'm a bit split on the notion of another FS. On one hand I think ext3/4 are perfectly good and widely supported now. On the other hand I think "free performance gains are obviously delightful".

Reason we are looking at something other than ext3/4 is scalability & Data integrity.

Ext4 just wont cut the mustard in future years for FS's that could reach Petabytes in size.

We need a better Enterprise FS, that is both scalable to the Peta/Exabyte size while also ensuring data integrity. We currently achieve this using Oracles ZFS, which is a top drawer FS. However, moving to Linux means we need something similar. Btrfs fits, we just need to wait until its actually stable to run in Production.

Thanks for the reply.

Khannie

LiamOSullivan wrote: »

I'm not a massive FS-guru, but a lot of threads on the Gentoo boards have been putting me off trying it. Here's one:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-834065.html

That's from 2010 when I think all the hullaballoo was but the code wasn't really ready yet so people were inevitably disappointed. I'd be interested to see how well it's doing now.

timbyr

Khannie wrote: »

LiamOSullivan wrote: »

I'm not a massive FS-guru, but a lot of threads on the Gentoo boards have been putting me off trying it. Here's one:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-834065.html

That's from 2010 when I think all the hullaballoo was but the code wasn't really ready yet so people were inevitably disappointed. I'd be interested to see how well it's doing now.

I do remember researching it a couple of months ago for use in a SAN and it came up short in certain critical areas.
Ended up RAID 5 + ext4 which I wasn't entirely happy with but btrfs wasn't checking the boxes for reasons I don't remember.

Need to look at it again.

leeroybrown

It takes years and enormous effort for a filesystem to be ready for mainstream usage particularly a filesystem with the kinds of advanced features Btrfs includes. A new filesystem codebase will always have bugs and early adopters will risk getting burned by data loss or corruption. Those people on the Gentoo forums should hardly be expecting data integrity. Many of us know early adopters of ReiserFS who were badly burned too.

Ext4 has only become stable so fast because it's based on Ext3 and had a modest feature set compared to Btrfs. Btrfs is a very ambitious project that will hopefully in future deliver an enterprise grade filesystem that will work straight out of the box on Linux distributions.

leeroybrown

OSI wrote: »

All valid points, but the OP needs it now, and it's not ready now, ZFS is.

Oh. Don't get me wrong. I agree completely that ZFS is a far better option for the OP right now.

Saganist

Hi,

Thanks for all the replys.

ZFS is what we would prefer to use, however the lack of kernel integration could be ( is ? ) a show-stopper for us.

I just can't imagine relying on zfs running in userland.

We were really early adopters of ZFS ( circa 2006-7 ) and we worked through any bugs we hit, never lost any data although we did hit some nasty issues in the beginning.

I think we will have to do the same with btrfs. Oracle has released a "production ready" version of btrfs in its Unbreakable Linux offering released a few weeks back. I think we will just go with it as a test for now and see where we are 6-12 months down the line.

Thanks again for all the input.

micko45

A bit off topic but if you have the budget then Veritas vxfs on linux is the way to go. Its currently certified up to RHEL 6.2.

We use for SAN storage and it is truly enterprise class.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veritas_File_System

Saganist

micko45 wrote: »

Veritas vxfs

Hi, we spent years trying to get rid of vxfs & disksuite in order to move to ZFS ( mainly due to cost ).

The thoughts of going back to it give me nightmares. :pac:

It really is a solid FS though.

LiamOSullivan

After some more reading on the subject, I'll be using BTRFS for my /home when I do a clean Gentoo install later this month. For now, I'm sticking to my ext2 /boot and ext4 for /, since those are fairly solid, and I'd much rather a messed up /home to a messed up /. I might use BTRFS for /usr/portage too; I'll have to read more into how it handles files.