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Btrfs Is Getting There, But Not Quite Ready For Production

Posted by timothy on from the delicious-on-popcrnfs dept.

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."

10 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Read their website by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It says "experimental." They appreciate you helping them test their file system out. I appreciate it too, so please do. But remember that you are testing an experimental filesystem. When it eats your data, make sure you report it and have backups.

    1. Re:Read their website by pipatron · · Score: 5, Informative

      Every file system is/should be labled "experimental" in a way. The long answer from the btrfs FAQ is pretty good, and makes some sense:

      Long answer: Nobody is going to magically stick a label on the btrfs code and say "yes, this is now stable and bug-free". Different people have different concepts of stability: a home user who wants to keep their ripped CDs on it will have a different requirement for stability than a large financial institution running their trading system on it. If you are concerned about stability in commercial production use, you should test btrfs on a testbed system under production workloads to see if it will do what you want of it. In any case, you should join the mailing list (and hang out in IRC) and read through problem reports and follow them to their conclusion to give yourself a good idea of the types of issues that come up, and the degree to which they can be dealt with. Whatever you do, we recommend keeping good, tested, off-system (and off-site) backups.

      --
      c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */
    2. Re:Read their website by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 5, Informative

      Did your cousin also find out what exact hardware and exact code was used? If my friend has had no problems with filesystem $FS and then I use it with different hardware and code implementing it, then there is still a significant chance that I will have trouble that he did not. Filesystems all work perfectly, because they are conceptual. It is the implementation that may or may not be stable.

      --
      Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
  2. ZFS by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Meanwhile ZFS announced that it was ready for production last month.

    http://zfsonlinux.org/

  3. Sorry Slashdot. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Ugh, I'm really sorry about this post, Slashdot. I really didn't think it was going to a "First post." What I really meant to post was

    OMFG fr1st psot!!!! APK!! crazy host file conspiracy! /etc/mod_me_down

  4. Re:Happy with XFS by MBGMorden · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    I don't know about being more reliable. I use XFS on my RAID array (mdadm) at home. I'm running the latest version of Linux Mint (Nadia), and if I ever lose poser and don't unmount that file system cleanly it looses all recent changes to the drive (and "recent" sometimes stretches to hours ago). The drive mounts fine and nothing appears corrupted (so I guess its not completely data loss), but any files changes (edits, additions, or deletions) to the file system are simply gone.

    Its gotten to the point where if I've just put a lot of stuff on the drive I unmount it and then remount it just to make sure everything gets flushed to disk. If I ever get a chance to rebuild that array it most certainly will be using something different.

    --
    "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
  5. Re:Why? by h4rr4r · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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+.

  6. Re:The oracle in the woodpile by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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?

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  7. Re:Yawn, yet another filesystem... by h4rr4r · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:Happy with XFS by bored · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.