I really would like more data about it. My impression is that the biggest limitation that btrfs suffers nowadays is a severely lacking communication. Even the official wiki is not so up to date, and there are a lot of horror stories surviving from years ago.
The situation has been quite reliable for some time now (single disk, raid{0,1,10}), moreover the feature set of btrfs is really wide (on par with zfs), with a very high flexibility: you can mix and match disks of different capacities, shrink and expand pools, change their redundance level through filtering, everything can be done online...
Even it it doesn't break your filesystem anymore: Performance is subpar in all aspects except sequential read/write even compared to ZFS. high snapshot count degrades performance and lot's of gotchas you discover after using it for a while. RAID1 is not RAID1 - it's oddness of the pid decides which disk to read from... scrub impacts io massivly. Tooling and documentation is not exactly great... lot's of quirky hacks to make up for design errors IMHO.
If it works for you, fine. Also it appears to get better - I won't touch it anymore if I can avoid it.
Well, so is ZFS, but in some situations, like choosing what filesystem to use on a rented dedicated server, any choice that could lead to a situation requiring physical hardware configuration changes is a non-starter.
ZFS licensing is an issue too, as it means that you can't just boot into any ol' Linux live CD (or remotely boot into a rescue environment) to fix the system or salvage the data on it.
> ZFS licensing is an issue too, as it means that you can't just boot into any ol' Linux live CD (or remotely boot into a rescue environment) to fix the system or salvage the data on it.
Sure you can. I've done just this with 3 different live CDs: ArchLinux, FreeBSD and OpenSolaris. I'm fairly sure I've also used ZFS on the Ubuntu Desktop live CD as well but that was just for playing rather than rescusing a degraded system.
The two most obvious reasons to assume so are that btrfs is in comparison relatively new and quite complex. Not to say zfs isn't complex, but I'd rather trust zfs just because of its age.
That being said, unless I really need those specific features, I go for ext4 whenever possible, as it has to be the most battle tested one, at least when it comes to *nix. It also seems that fsck.ext4 has almost magical powers sometimes, but that shouldn't stop you from making backups obviously.
muxator|8 years ago
The situation has been quite reliable for some time now (single disk, raid{0,1,10}), moreover the feature set of btrfs is really wide (on par with zfs), with a very high flexibility: you can mix and match disks of different capacities, shrink and expand pools, change their redundance level through filtering, everything can be done online...
nisa|8 years ago
If it works for you, fine. Also it appears to get better - I won't touch it anymore if I can avoid it.
CyberShadow|8 years ago
Well, so is ZFS, but in some situations, like choosing what filesystem to use on a rented dedicated server, any choice that could lead to a situation requiring physical hardware configuration changes is a non-starter.
ZFS licensing is an issue too, as it means that you can't just boot into any ol' Linux live CD (or remotely boot into a rescue environment) to fix the system or salvage the data on it.
laumars|8 years ago
Sure you can. I've done just this with 3 different live CDs: ArchLinux, FreeBSD and OpenSolaris. I'm fairly sure I've also used ZFS on the Ubuntu Desktop live CD as well but that was just for playing rather than rescusing a degraded system.
e12e|8 years ago
For backing up to another file system? How so? Is there something like "zfs send" or even "xfsdump"?
Honest question - I haven't look that closely at btrfs.
unknown|8 years ago
[deleted]
DCKing|8 years ago
Honest question - my home box runs a Btrfs mirror on openSUSE.
iforgotpassword|8 years ago
That being said, unless I really need those specific features, I go for ext4 whenever possible, as it has to be the most battle tested one, at least when it comes to *nix. It also seems that fsck.ext4 has almost magical powers sometimes, but that shouldn't stop you from making backups obviously.
Related: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/...