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Btrfs Could Be the Default File System In Ubuntu Meerkat
An anonymous reader writes "The EXT family of file systems (ext2, ext3, ext4) have ruled many Linux distributions for a long time, and Ubuntu has been no exception. But things may no longer be the same for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. Canonical's Scott James Remnant said in a blog post that plans are on for doing work to have btrfs as an installation option, and that the possibility of making it the default file system in Ubuntu 10.10 has not been ruled out."
It’s a tough gauntlet, and it would only made with the knowledge that production servers and desktops can be run on Lucid as a fully supported version of Ubuntu at the same time. I’d give it a 1-in-5 chance.
There are quite a few pre-conditions for it to be made alpha, so it is not as likely as the summary makes it out to be.
The main Btrfs features include:
Extent based file storage (2^64 max file size)
Space efficient packing of small files
Space efficient indexed directories
Dynamic inode allocation
Writable snapshots
Subvolumes (separate internal filesystem roots)
Object level mirroring and striping
Checksums on data and metadata (multiple algorithms available)
Compression
Integrated multiple device support, with several raid algorithms
Online filesystem check
Very fast offline filesystem check
Efficient incremental backup and FS mirroring
Online filesystem defragmentation
Currently the code is in an early implementation phase, and not all of these have yet been implemented. See the Development timeline for detailed release plans.
https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Alternately, you could consider using ZFS if you can live with the uncertainty of the opensolaris project. The major plus is that all the functionality is already there.
Don't forget that FreeBSD has a native implementation of ZFS as well. (You can also get ZFS for FUSE, but as such it's probably not suited for a main file system.)
ZFS is also available in FreeBSD 7.0 and later. It's even marked as "production quality" in FreeBSD 8.0 and later.
It's a few versions behind (ZFSv14) OpenSolaris (ZFSv24), but on par with Solaris 10 (ZFSv15). FreeBSD 8.1 should have ZFSv15 in it by the time it's released this summer. And there's work ongoing to bring ZFSv20-something into 9.0.
Btrfs will be the default filesystem for MeeGo:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.handhelds.meego.devel/1510
Really? Are we still doing that?
...except it's not production quality. Please skim the past 6-8 months of posts to the freebsd-fs and freebsd-stable lists: you'll be surprised at the number of error reports.
Booting from a ZFS pool on FreeBSD is also somewhat broken; users are still reporting issues with it, and booting from raidz still doesn't appear possible. Supposedly booting from a ZFS mirror works.
Simply put: if you want to use ZFS and expect stability, run OpenSolaris or Solaris 10.
Indeed. Btrfs is still making disk format changes. They aren't very serious, but hey, they are there. Not a sign of stability, no matter how much cheksumming you throw at it.
Obviously, Btrfs also does volume management without LVM. It even manages to do better than ZFS in some areas, for example Btrfs can reduce the pool capacity easily thanks to back references (a new and cool fs technique which is being incorporated to Btrfs), whereas ZFS still can't reduce the capacity of a pool and it will take a lot of complexity to implement it (you really should read the link)
Or you can run FreeBSD 8, which has ZFS and has had DTrace for a while now.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
FreeBSD 8-STABLE is now at zfs pool version 14 and you can now boot from zfs directly if you wish so. I don't because, well I use full disk encryption with geli so I need a separate boot partition anyway. And though my laptop indeed have 4GB of memory, I still have 2.5GB free after a few hours of using Gnome, Firefox, Thunderbird, PostgreSQL and a bunch of xterm... Although I use usb keys, webcam, mouse, printer, I don't have any usb related problems so I guess I'm just lucky.
All in all, it beats the crap out of using Linux with ext2/3/4 and LVM. Try to use snapshots on LVM and you'll quickly find why it's a bad idea. The good news is that with btrfs, Linux may catch up to where FreeBSD is now in 2-3 years time.
Oh, by the way, as an added bonus you completely avoid the clusterfuck of alsa/pulseaudio...