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Fedora 16 To Use Btrfs Filesystem By Default
dkd903 writes "According to proposals for Fedora 16, Btrfs will be the default filesystem used in that release. The proposal has been approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. In Fedora 16, the switch from EXT4 to Btrfs will be a 'simple switch' — it means that major Btrfs features such as RAID and LVM capabilities will not be forced onto users."
Can't wait to turn all my files into butter.
Pretty sure default filesystem != mandatory. They're not going to suddenly drop support for ext*.
This means that all the good things with BTRFS could be stable enough for servers within a year or so. Hopefully, this means that Linux admins won't have to spend much more time longingly lusting after ZFS.
Does this mean we are a step closer to the possibility of snapshotting system states and rolling back to before a bunch of updates were installed?
Summary: We like it when you test new stuff for us, and our customers are clamoring for this filesystem in RHEL, so we're going to let you try it out on Fedora for a while and experience the hiccoughs. And speaking of new stuff, we're going to finally get around to moving up to grub2 like everyone else, which we haven't bothered to implement even though it's much better, and we allegedly like new stuff.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was handed a block of drives that had been in a server recently with software raid and asked to rebuild the array and recover the data. This had been assembled with mdadm. Will this change make such recovery a non issue with snapshots and the like, providing of course the array had been running btrfs?
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Surely there could be a better source for this than one blog post (I know, high UID so I must be new here.)
But linking to something like http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/F16BtrfsDefaultFs or http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/149196/focus%3D149215 to lend a little authority might have been nice...
the Guinness World of Records has awarded the Shortest Living Filesystem Record to ext4
In the long run btrfs will be good to have, especially with solid state drives gaining popularity. Even embedded devices can easily have multi-gigabyte flash chips, and btrfs would be faster and more efficient on these when compared to jffs2 and yaffs.
It makes perfect sense. Btrfs won't get stable for RHEL unless it's beta tested in Fedora first.
For some reason I'm getting really low performance on btrfs, both on a single disk and on raid1 configurations. I have tried with -nodatacow and with and without -compress, but it seems it doesn't have any effect. Also, I have 90 gigabytes of free space on Storage1 but I get drive full error when I try to write there. Rebalancing it didn't fix the issue. The btrfs command-line tool is, well, rather incomplete and somewhat buggy, like e.g. when I query 'btrfs fi df /media/Storage2' -- with Storage2 being the raid1 pool -- it reports the size and usage of the smallest disk on it, not the whole thing. I don't understand why. I also have had some filesystem corruption which caused me to lose quite a bit of data, and again the only way to fix it was rebalancing the whole thing which takes the whole damn day.
I do understand that it's a filesystem that's still under development, but the tools atleast need a lot more work. They're just too incomplete at the moment. I'm not really sure pushing it as the default filesystem for end-users is a good idea yet.
What about fsck support? The last time I checked, btrfs does not support this important feature to allow recovering from hard disk issues.
Yes, it was officially fixed in 2.6.32 or something like that. They keep adding more features and improving it, but the format is supposed to be fixed by now.
Anyway. I don't know if default is a good idea, but even Debian offered btrfs as an option when I installed it on my new laptop last month. It is hardly cutting edge anymore ;)
..how i like my women ... FAT and 16
ReiserFS will kill it
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
Nobody said Fedora was stable.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
...Btrfs is currently under heavy development, and not suitable for any uses other than benchmarking and review.
That sure limits the uses of a default Fedora installation.
This is good news, I've been thinking about trying BTRFS out for a while now.
One big question, for me at least - does BTRFS have full built-in support for RAID5 and RAID6? The last time I checked it was still "under development".
I'd like to see btrfs implement a proper block tiering system. They're doing something for storing "hot" blocks on SSD, but what about giving us the full monty? Where I can rank storage types myself, assigning a different cost to each type. Hotest blocks in RAMdrive (battery backed of course), next step down fast SSD and then slower SSD, followed by Fibre, SAS, SATA and finally tape. Yes tape. Just create snapshots as backups. These blocks then sit there and drift down to tape storage when required.
Funny how this has all been done before when disks were really slow. I suppose it's the big gap of incredibly fast SSD's (compared to mechanical) that's resurrecting these ideas. With this done, btrfs could be stuck in as a relatively cheap SAN/NAS solution. All done in a big tower case in my loft.
That's the point. Red Hat enables it in Fedora and, when they stop getting bug reports, they enable it in RHEL.
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There is currently alot of work to be done, if you have btrfs mounts at the moment in F15 then you system hangs a few seconds after restoring from a suspend.
it means that major Btrfs features such as RAID and LVM capabilities will not be forced onto users."
It's too bad that the default fedora setup wants to set up an LVM already even with ext4, and yells at you when you try to not use an LVM
No matter how well you design your FS, errors can happen. Generally it is because of hardware below it but the cause isn't important, the recovery is. That's why NTFS has chkdsk. Many people don't know it and assume it isn't needed because it runs extremely rarely, a user will likely never see it. It isn't like the old FAT32 days where you needed to run it on every crash. However it is still there, and we (IT) still use it from time to time. If something goes wrong, the filesystem can be left in a state where you need to run a tool to fix it and recover what you can.
Same deal with BTRFS. It doesn't need a fsck tool for daily use, but you really want something like it if shit goes really wrong.
And calling it one was a poor marketing move on Sun's part. In any case, ZFS (and eventually btrfs) will obsolete write-in-place filesystems like UFS (or have already obsoleted, depending what you've been using in the last 7 or 8 years since ZFS went production).
you had me at #!
Red Hat turned against we IT geeks who got them accepted into the corporate environment, and instead made the hobbyist user to have a guinea pig distro with unstable things in it like BTRFS. Sure, I'm excited about the day when butterfs will be a stable option, but that isn't yet. Screw Fedora, Screw Red Hat, use something else where the care about stability and where the hobbyist/user/server versions are all just kernel and package changes on the same distro.
I don't really need to say much more. Fedora is just too bleeding edge even for non-production IMHO. I don't want to boot up my box and have my file system screwed. Sorry Red Hat. You should go back to the old model of eating your own dog food. Perhaps a model like Ubuntu with a Red Hat LTS and a Red Hat Latest Version, but the latter being a little more stable than Fedora. I digress, this is why I am on Ubuntu now. It's not perfect, but it has been a much more positive experience for me than running Fedora. Even on non-LTS releases I haven't had a update blow up a system.
no problem with that on Slowlaris, since they went from BSD based to that System V R4 the thing became a pig anyway. It was like getting the RAM and processor speed cut in half on the Sparc V and Sparc 2 workstations I adminned at the time. A slow-as-molasses-in-January filesystem is the finishing touch
Your presence requested 2 answer simple question (Score:-1)
by Anonymous Coward on 06-09-11 15:01 (#36394150)
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2225174&cid=36390518
This is why people like me think you're a fuckhead, apk. You log in as AC so you can sign some posts and not others. Go piss up a very short rope.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I know, I just meant that if Fedora isn't considered stable, of course btrfs shouldn't be considered stable.
That doesn't follow. Ubuntu 11.04 isn't "stable", as such, but it ships with Firefox 4, which is considered stable.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Nice, you spent at least five times longer in this part of this thread than I did. Let's see if I can do it again.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I see your point, but a filesystem is a kernel feature, and much more integral to the OS than a browser.