On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 11:17:21PM +0000, Carsten Mattner wrote:
On 3/12/18, Leonid Isaev via arch-general <arch-general@archlinux.org> wrote:
What's wrong with btrfs? Yeah, I know it is not marked "stable", but this is just a label. And people shying away from it doesn't help in advancing its stability either.
btrfs never got on my radar because it's Linux only and its instability is a blocker. If I have to be careful how I use a filesystem even when I didn't explicitly enable beta features, I'm too scared to put my files on it. If I were a Suse Enterprise customer, I might use it, but Red Hat isn't behind it anymore, so it's like Reiser3 back in the day. Only Suse was putting their weight behind it. Well Facebook has developers on it, but Facebook isn't a distro developer and can't be trusted with continued maintenance, since they might switch on a weekend to some Facebook-FS. Facebook has too many engineers and is reinventing stuff in-house a lot.
This is all corporate politics, but see first comment here [1]. And you still haven't explained what instability? I use btrfs on all my machines, including its subvolume/snapshot features to protect against failed updates (essentially, I reimplemented some features of snapper in bash :) because I don't like dbus). Of course, you need to do scrubbing regularly, but it's trivial to write a cron job/systemd timer for this task...
btrfs and zfs suffer from design limitations, but zfs has been stable and in petabyte production for a long time across many organizations. btrfs is one of many future Linux filesystems with no clear winner so far.
If noone uses it, then sure, btrfs will remain an underdog of filesystems. Also, if you care about petabyte production, you should know better than asking on this list...
All I want is a modern filesystem whose volume I can share without exposing it via a network protocol.
Hmm, btrfs-send(1)? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14907771 Cheers, -- Leonid Isaev