A Short History of Btrfs

diegocgteleline.es writes "Valerie Aurora, a Linux file system developer and ex-ZFS designer, has posted an article with great insight on how Btrfs, the file system that will replace Ext4, was created and how it works. Quoting: 'When it comes to file systems, it's hard to tell truth from rumor from vile slander: the code is so complex, the personalities are so exaggerated, and the users are so angry when they lose their data. You can't even settle things with a battle of the benchmarks: file system workloads vary so wildly that you can make a plausible argument for why any benchmark is either totally irrelevant or crucially important. ... we'll take a behind-the-scenes look at the design and development of Btrfs on many levels — technical, political, personal — and trace it from its origins at a workshop to its current position as Linus's root file system.'"

Comments

Re:So,

[PhunkySchtuff]

Aside from Copy on Write, one other feature that this filesystem has that I would consider essential in a modern filesystem is full checksumming. As drives get larger and larger, the chance of a random undetected error on write increases and having full checksums on every block of data that gets written to the drive means that when something is written, I know it's written. It also means that when I read something back from the disk, I know that it was the data that was put there and didn't get silently corrupted by the [sata controller | dodgy cable | cosmic rays] on the way to the disk and back.

Re:So, what is the status of btrfs?

[TheRaven64]

Meanwhile, FreeBSD and OpenSolaris are shipping with a version of ZFS that is usable now...