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."

Comments

Re:The oracle in the woodpile

[larry bagina]

Oracle now owns ZFS. They could relicense it if they wanted to. BTRFS was started before the Sun acquisition but it seems strange* to develop BTRFS as a GPL file system with ZFS-like features while ZFS is mature and reliable today.

* Yes, they're a large corporation and right hand doesn't know what left hand does... but isn't this more like the index finger not knowing what the middle finger is doing?

Re:Happy with XFS

[Kz]

Your happy with XFS because your machine has never lost power or crashed. If either of those things happened with the older versions of XFS it was nearly a 100% guarantee you would lose data. Now i'm told its more reliable.

It _is_ quite reliable, even on the face of hardware failure.

Several years ago, I hit the 8TB limit of ext3 and had to migrate to a bigger filesystem. ext4 wasn't ready back then (and still today it's not easy to use on big volumes). Already had bad experiences with reiserfs (which was standard on SuSE), and the "you'll lose data"warnings on XFS docs made me nervous. It was obviously designed to work on very high-end hardware, which I couldn't afford.

so, I did extensive torture testing. hundreds of pull-the-plug situations, on the host, storage box and SAN switch, with tens of processes writing thousands of files on million-files directories. it was a bloodbath.

when the dust settled, ext3 was the best by far, managing to never lose more than 10 small files in the worst case, over 70% of the cases recovered cleanly. XFS was slightly worse, never more than 16 lost files and roughly 50% clean recoveries. ReiserFS was really bad, always losing more than 50-70 files and sometimes killing the volume. JFS didn't lose the volume, but lost files count never went below 130, sometimes several hundred.

needless to say, i switched to XFS, and haven't lost a single byte yet. and yes, there has been a few hardware failures that triggered scary rebuilding tasks, but completed cleanly.

Re:It's completely ideological.

[UnknownSoldier]

Please mod parent informative.

One of the retarded things about btrfs is that you can not see how much disk space is being used by each subvolume. How the hell can you have a filesystem and not know how much space is in use or free ??

The design of ZFS is much more wholistic. That is, when we take a step back and look at both the micro and macro we see that we are really trying to solve 3 problems:

* Volume Management
* File System
* Data Integrity

ZFS solves all of these be leveraging knowledge from ALL the layers as one cohesive whole.
https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/rampant_layering_violation

Why RAID is fundamentally broken
https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/entry/raid_z

Another interesting doc
http://www.scribd.com/doc/43973847/5/ZFS-Design-Principles