OpenSUSE 13.2 To Use Btrfs By Default

An anonymous reader writes "OpenSUSE has shared features coming to their 13.2 release in November. The big feature is using Btrfs by default instead of EXT4. OpenSUSE is committed to Btrfs and, surprisingly, they are the first major Linux distribution to use it by default. But then again, they were also big ReiserFS fans. Other planned OpenSUSE 13.2 features are Wayland 1.4, KDE Frameworks 5, and a new Qt5 front-end to YaST."

Comments

Beta testers

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally someone who beta tests btrfs for me!

Re:Beta testers

[buchner.johannes]

You can create a file system on a file on your disk (similar to a swap file).
Contrary to popular believe this is not slower than a partition, because if the file is mostly continuous, it can be mapped to disk directly by the kernel. Here I create a file system using a sparse file:
$ truncate +20G mylocal.fs
$ mkfs.btrfs mylocal.fs
$ mkdir -p mylocal; sudo mount mylocal.fs mylocal/

You can use such file systems, for example, to bundle directories with many files, which are deleted/created many times. This causes fragmentation in the file system. Contrary to another popular believe, yes, this is a problem on Linux file systems, and it slows down reads. None of the file system currently has a defragger implemented. Btrfs is actually developing one, but I think it is not in the release yet. The recommended solution is rewriting files (shake).

Sub file system containers can be easily resized, and with sparse files only use up the space filled with data. I use them for the linux kernel build directory (you shouldn't build in /usr/src), for portage (many files, changing frequently), and scientific data directories, to limit the fragmentation, and keep speed high. I use reiserfs for this -- find a managing script here: https://github.com/JohannesBuc...