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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.
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.
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)