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Btrfs Is Getting There, But Not Quite Ready For Production
An anonymous reader writes "Btrfs is the next-gen filesystem for Linux, likely to replace ext3 and ext4 in coming years. Btrfs offers many compelling new features and development proceeds apace, but many users still aren't sure whether it's 'ready enough' to entrust their data to. Anchor, a webhosting company, reports on trying it out, with mixed feelings. Their opinion: worth a look-in for most systems, but too risky for frontline production servers. The writeup includes a few nasty caveats that will bite you on serious deployments."
ZFS is outside the kernel tree. That is not an ideological issue, but a practical one. It means updates will not come from the normal channels, it means kernel updates form normal channels could break it and it is not getting the attention from the kernel devs an fs should get.
ZFS on linux has probably less testing than Btrfs at this point. It has near no real world testing. Just because the Solaris ZFS is great, and the BSD one is coming along means nothing for the stability and correctness of the Linux port.
If you want to use a different OS than this entire discussion is worthless. You might as well suggest switching everything to OSX and using HFS+.
Ext3 is still chugging along and doing what you want. A filesystem that sacrifices everything for stability.
Not everyone has the same wants and needs. Lots of competing filesystems is a good thing, it leads to a market of ideas. Your lets pick one and force everyone to suffer with our choice just leads to stagnation and even worse results.
No, that's FUD and/or misunderstanding on your part.
"data=ordered" is ext3/4's name for "don't expose stale data on a crash," something which XFS has never done,
Actually, I think your the one that doesn't understand how a journaling file system works. The problem with XFS has been that it only journals meta data, and the data portions associated with the metadata are not synchronized with the metadata updates (delayed allocation an all that). This means the metadata portions (filename, sizes, etc) will be correct based on the last journal update flushed to media, but the data referenced by that meta-data may not be.
A filesystem that is either ordering its meta data/data updates against a disk with proper barriers, or journing the data alongside the meta data doesn't have this problem. The filesystem _AND_ its data remain in a consistent state.
So, until your understand this basic idea, don't go claiming you know _ANYTHING_ about filesystems.