OpenSUSE May Be First Major Distro To Adopt Btrfs By Default

An anonymous reader writes "The openSUSE Linux distribution looks like it may be the first major Linux distribution to ship the Btrfs file-system by default. The openSUSE 13.1 release is due out in November and is still using EXT4 by default, but after that the developers are looking at having openSUSE using Btrfs by default on new installations. The Btrfs features to be enabled would be the ones the developers feel are data-safe."

Comments

Pronunciation question...

[Beardydog]

Should I be calling it "Butterface"? Because I am calling it "Butterface."

exciting.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've gotten 4 machines running "native zfs for linux" using the stable ppa for ubuntu server 12.04.

It has been a truly mixed bag. Like a bag full of with crashed machines. At least the data has survived each time.

I am genuinely excited at the idea of BTRFs becoming production ready.

Re:exciting.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Like a bag full of with crashed machines

You probably ran out of memory. No, seriously, don't try it on a machine with less than 3GB of RAM. It's not optimized for that use case yet (version 0.6.2 is current - 1.0 will be 'ready').

No surprise

[willoughby]

I remember when SuSE was one of the only distros, perhaps the only one, which used reiserfs as the default filesystem. No, there's no punchline. This was when you could buy it in a box (including the little chamelon pin) off the shelf at CompUSA. SuSE has always had a fascination with new filesystems.

Re:No surprise

[ebno-10db]

I remember when SuSE was one of the only distros, perhaps the only one, which used reiserfs as the default filesystem.

Big mistake - it almost killed SuSE.

Re:DON'T INSTALL OPENSUSE 13.1

[Bill Dimm]

According to the summary, OpenSUSE 13.1 is not the one that will default to btrfs, so I don't know why you are saying not to install 13.1.

The openSUSE 13.1 release is due out in November and is still using EXT4 by default, but after that the developers are looking at having openSUSE using Btrfs by default on new installations.

Re:We're what 5 generations beyond NTFS now?!

[inhuman_4]

Phoronix Benchmarks will give you an idea of the perfomance differences. Btrfs is usually middle of the pack, so nothing to write home about. The big deal with btrfs is the new features like COW, snapshots, filesystem compression, etc. If you are looking for more performance btrfs is not going to impress. If you are looking for better RAID perfomance, snapshots, compression, etc. Then btrfs is going to be huge for linux. It is probably the closest linux will get to having a ZFS clone.

Re:It'll be news once they do it

[icebike]

On the other hand, OpenSuse, and SuSE before them, have a track record of adopting newer file systems as the default.
They also demote some filesystems as the default, (while still making them available for the user to set as the default.).
(I still use reiserfs on some systems, it may not be massively scale-able, but its pretty bullet proof).

But more to the point, I can't really understand your point about RSNs, since Btrfs is already available in OpenSuse and several other Distros for the last several releases.

Further, on Opensuse at least, the user can set any of the choices as the default for any new partitions, or as the system default at install time. The available choices include Btrfs, XFS and Reiserfs, and three versions of Ext.

Its not that something is promised and not delivered. Its more akin to having the default web browser set to Chrome or Firefox.

There is no broken promises here. Simply a failure to understand that the choice has been there for years.