Facebook To Begin Deploying Btrfs

Give me a big plate of beans by Anonymous Coward · 2014-03-27 06:05 · Score: 4, Funny

and I'll start deploying all kinds of btrfs.

How about real problems by i+kan+reed · 2014-03-27 06:07 · Score: 5, Funny

When are they going to make the users of their website tolerable human beings instead of insane caricatures designed to make you lose all faith in humanity?

Re:How about real problems by Anonymous Coward · 2014-03-27 06:11 · Score: 3, Insightful

Bad news, those are the real human beings. The tolerable ones you want to rule the place are actually marketing sockpuppets.
Re:How about real problems by TheSpinningBrain · 2014-03-27 06:12 · Score: 2

Unfortunately, I believe that is the role of the user. I don't think that Facebook would try re-routing users to code.org.
Re:How about real problems by Anonymous Coward · 2014-03-27 06:41 · Score: 1

Get better friends.
Re:How about real problems by gstoddart · 2014-03-27 06:45 · Score: 4, Funny

When are they going to make the users of their website tolerable human beings instead of insane caricatures designed to make you lose all faith in humanity?
And ... this is different from Slashdot, how? ;-)

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Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Re:How about real problems by serviscope_minor · 2014-03-27 07:05 · Score: 2

And ... this is different from Slashdot, how? ;-)
Slashdot has more jokes about beowulf clusters. And if you act like a jerk, someone will call you an insenstitve clod.

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SJW n. One who posts facts.
Re:How about real problems by kodomo · 2014-03-27 07:36 · Score: 3, Funny

Can you explain it again, but using a car analogy?
Re:How about real problems by amiga3D · 2014-03-27 08:13 · Score: 2

The jokes here are better.
Re:How about real problems by s.petry · 2014-03-27 08:36 · Score: 1

Because "Get off my Lawn!" and "Screw your meme!"?

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-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Re:How about real problems by dudpixel · 2014-03-27 14:02 · Score: 1

And ... this is different from Slashdot, how? ;-)
Slashdot has more jokes about beowulf clusters. And if you act like a jerk, someone will call you an insenstitve clod.
Is this misidentification of jerks a fairly recent problem? I wonder what steps we could take to rectify this issue...

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This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.

I guess Minecraft will stop using it by barlevg · 2014-03-27 06:11 · Score: 3, Funny

If Facebook likes something, it must be evil.

Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by vux984 · 2014-03-27 06:17 · Score: 4, Interesting

If Facebook likes something, it must be evil.
If facebook buys something outright, it will be turned to social-shit. FTFY.
If I happen to share Zuckershits taste in coffee makers, that won't affect my enjoyment of the coffee maker. On the other hand, if Facebook buys out my favorite coffee maker... then yeah, my next coffee maker will be a brand that doesn't try and change my status to "making facebook coffee" everytime I brew a cup. (Well... I don't have a facebook account so that's moot... although I expect a facebook coffeemaker would require one before allowing coffee to be brewed so... there's that.)
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by barlevg · 2014-03-27 06:20 · Score: 1

Well they "bought out" (that is, "hired") the lead Btrfs developers, so how do you count that?
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by williagr · 2014-03-27 06:23 · Score: 1

Why do you think that? Both Instagram and Whats App are working as they originally did prior to their acquisition.
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by barlevg · 2014-03-27 06:28 · Score: 1

For now. How long did it take Google to begin forcing G+ integration onto Youtube?
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by vux984 · 2014-03-27 06:29 · Score: 2

Both Instagram and Whats App are working as they originally did prior to their acquisition.
Well except where everything you do is fed into facebook's data mining backend, and its only a matter of time before they add a back channel to start showing you facebook ads.
They will monetize it. Its just a matter of time.
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by vux984 · 2014-03-27 06:32 · Score: 3, Interesting

Well they "bought out" (that is, "hired") the lead Btrfs developers, so how do you count that?
I still see it as a jointly developed GPL project, that facebook cannot own.
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · 2014-03-27 06:37 · Score: 1

Well, considering G+ didn't exist when Youtube was purchased... Its not that good of an analogy.
Try comparing it to the Microsoft skype purchase.
Funny note, Microsoft is now hosting developer video hangouts over G+. Despite owning skype outright, and owning a part of facebook.
I also hate the Youtube G+ Integration, for the opposite reason. G+ is great, youtube and the comments there are horrible and shouldn't be brought to light anywhere civilized people gather.

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Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by Anonymous Coward · 2014-03-27 07:23 · Score: 1

Dude, seriously, you don't need to provide a link explaining what Jumping the Shark means.
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by UnknownSoldier · 2014-03-27 07:50 · Score: 1, Informative

While all the hipsters were using Btrfs, the real geeks were using ZFS and not worrying about bad designs such as the inability to query free space ...
https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/...
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by rev0lt · 2014-03-27 09:41 · Score: 1

So, you're saying that would never happen if they stayed independent? Such innocence...
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by rev0lt · 2014-03-27 09:42 · Score: 2

Not only the geeks, but also big corps. And everyone that actually cares about data integrity.
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by vux984 · 2014-03-27 10:33 · Score: 1

So, you're saying that would never happen if they stayed independent?
It would be instagram ads and whatsapp ads. Not facebook ads. That's a big difference.
The amount of information whatsapp has on me is pretty limited compared to the profiles facebook or google are trying to build. I'm ok with small individual companies having small limited profiles of my activity with that company. I strongly object to the macro-scale surveillance that google and facebook attempt.
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by rev0lt · 2014-03-27 11:51 · Score: 1

Well, I'm no expert, so take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt, but Whatsapp would never be profitable as a standalone company with their current business model. And what you call pretty limited, its not when cross-referenced with eg. your cellphone number (Facebook, Google and VK all "encourage" you to give this). For many people, a cellphone number is way more stable than a facebook profile. And whatsapp (either the app or the server) keeps full blown logs of all conversations, so its quite easy to mine them for keywords, phone numbers, places, urls and pictures.
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by vux984 · 2014-03-27 12:03 · Score: 1

Meh, I'd still rather it be whatsapp than facebook. I perceived them to be much smaller, even if still fairly big.
But for what its worth I've never had a whatsapp account nor an instagram one, nor a facebook one. I find nearly all internet "social" to be a monumental waste of time bundled with massive privacy invasion and avoid it pretty thoroughly.
I do have a skype account though, and would love to find an alternative to that too. Because the ads bug me, and the attachment now to microsoft bugs me.
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by rev0lt · 2014-03-27 21:46 · Score: 1

Meh, I'd still rather it be whatsapp than facebook. I perceived them to be much smaller, even if still fairly big.
I understand that feeling. But its not based on facts or even objective... People often perceive big companies as "evil", and forget that, in that regard, all companies are evil in some way or another.

But for what its worth I've never had a whatsapp account nor an instagram one, nor a facebook one. I find nearly all internet "social" to be a monumental waste of time bundled with massive privacy invasion and avoid it pretty thoroughly.
Well, I had a whatsapp account and a facebook account. While I tend to agree regarding the waste of time, it is also a way for me to connect with friends and colleagues from past companies, and often discuss technical stuff and what's happening in the world. Isolation is good often, but its not good always. And while you can connect in real life, is quite hard to keep track of friends when they're scattered a bit all over the world.

I do have a skype account though, and would love to find an alternative to that too. Because the ads bug me, and the attachment now to microsoft bugs me.
A tool is a tool. What matters which brand produces it? Again, the "big" company stigma... :)
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by vux984 · 2014-03-27 22:01 · Score: 1

all companies are evil in some way or another.
Yes, all companies are evil. Bigger companies have the capacity to do more evil.
And while I have no objection to the usual "build a real product, sell that product to customers, make money" business model, even if it leads to evil, Facebook (and social in general) have a business model i abhor. So there's that too.
And to top if off, I dislike Zuckerberg intensely as a person, have no respect for him, and wish to do nothing to enrich him, while there are any number of other CEOs who I have nothing personally against, even though i know there companies have done some nasty stuff (Microsoft, Sony... for example). And still many more CEOs who are perfectly normal guys that I get along with just fine.
, it is also a way for me to connect with friends and colleagues from past companies, and often discuss technical stuff and what's happening in the world
I dislike the social business model. I am not antisocial. I avoid businesses that go the "free service but we try and profile you and sell that to someone else" in favor of businesses that say "this is a service, we charge $X for it and you are the customer", and above those I favor businesses that say "here is the service, run it on your own servers, and we'll sell you support.
There are instant messaging, forum tools, and other collaborative systems out there using the latter models and I'm happy to use them.
A tool is a tool.
Right.
What matters which brand produces it?
Not the brand, but what the tool is and does. Is it a secure two way messenger that I have complete control over? Or is it is an insecure system hosted by a 3rd party who actively monitors everything I do with it to try and profile me? Developed by a company that is more interested in "monetizing it" with ads then just treating ME as the customer.
I don't mind Microsoft owning skype because its microsoft. I don't like Microsoft owning skype because they are very actively turning the product from something I was already unsatisfied with (insecure, 3rd party, no control) into something I despise (all that, plus advertising, and blatant content mining)
The only reason I still use it is because I find the voice quality, and call connection reliability to be higher than the alternatives I've tried, the ease of having multiple 'group chats' in progress, and the seamless ability to jump from group chat to group voice. If I could find something else that did it better and had a business model I liked more, I'd switch.
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by Richard_at_work · 2014-03-28 00:58 · Score: 1

In the same way that Mozilla cannot "own" Firefox?
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by vux984 · 2014-03-28 06:44 · Score: 1

Mozilla owns the Firefox brand, not the code. Hence Iceweasel etc.
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by rev0lt · 2014-03-29 00:47 · Score: 1

And to top if off, I dislike Zuckerberg intensely as a person, have no respect for him,
So. these sound like personal feelings and not a rational evaluation; I',m fine with that, but its not really a valid argument. And regarding Facebok, I'd be really surprised if Zuckerberg had any kind of real control over the company.

here is the service, run it on your own servers, and we'll sell you support.
You realize that, without a centralized system, the social model would not exist, right?

Not the brand, but what the tool is and does. Is it a secure two way messenger that I have complete control over?
Its not. It's more of a 2-way p2p messaging system. And I'd take skype proprietary encryption over any SIP-based hardware device. I'd really doubt that what you describe even exists. And even if it did, you could not prove it. You cannot prove security, you can only disprove it. You can demonstrate its secure by lack of proof otherwise, but it is a play with words. Having the source code adds almost nothing to this, except you get the "illusion of control". Do you really check every detail, every line of code? And I'm assuming you're aware of the algorithmic complexity of some of the crypto code out there; even fully transparent projects like openssh have bugs now and then.

Or is it is an insecure system hosted by a 3rd party who actively monitors everything I do with it to try and profile me?
Every system on the internet is potentially insecure. Your dedicated server may have hardware backdoors installed. Your crypto software may be leaking details. Your CPU may be flawed in specific computations. The fact is, you control very little on a modern stack. And don't even get me started on communication channels...

The only reason I still use it is because I find the voice quality, and call connection reliability to be higher than the alternatives I've tried, the ease of having multiple 'group chats' in progress, and the seamless ability to jump from group chat to group voice. If I could find something else that did it better and had a business model I liked more, I'd switch
Well, you can do it easily with both SIP over VPN or IAX2, and Asterisk. And the available stack is fully opensource, and you can run it on your own server. Now you just need to convince people to use your server and install all the required software for it.
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by vux984 · 2014-03-29 09:03 · Score: 1

So. these sound like personal feelings and not a rational evaluation
I don't know how you can presume to weigh in whether or not whether I like someone is "rational" or not.
You realize that, without a centralized system, the social model would not exist, right?
Good riddance. I can be social without "the social model". Because I was participating on forums before facebook. And IRC. And usenet. And email.
And I'd take skype proprietary encryption over [...]
Microsoft can and does monitor the chat. They collect demographics and scan for keywords and build profiles. The ads are targeted. It may as well not be encrypted at all.
Every system on the internet is potentially insecure. Your dedicated server may have hardware backdoors installed. Your crypto software may be leaking details. Your CPU may be flawed in specific computations.
"potentially". "may". "may". "may".... vs "is".
The fact is, you control very little on a modern stack.
But I can firewall the modern stack, and monitor traffic, and if its communicating somewhere it shouldn't be I can see it, and I can block it, and challenge it.
I'll take my chances with bugs in openssh etc where at least the effort is to try to ensure its secure, vs skype, which isn't even slightly secure from Microsoft.
Well, you can do it easily with both SIP over VPN or IAX2, and Asterisk. Now you just need to convince people to use your server and install all the required software for it.
That's a substantial undertaking, and pretty much the opposite of "easily". And I've never seen an SIP client that handles maintaining conversations with multiple groups of people anything like skype does.
As far as it goes, it would be pretty trivial to break skype into an email model. Let anyone who wants run skype servers, interconnected to the rest. I could choose my 'skype provider' or run my own instead of it being microsoft or nothing.
Communications between me and my skype provider and other users on my skype provider would be limited to that provider.
This is all largely a solved problem. We can have a skype system without a centralized monolith we all have to trust* at the center of it.
And they don't deserve any trust, because they are actively engaging in precisely the sorts of things I don't want -- shoving ads down my throat, and harvesting profile information. If they just charged me a couple bucks and delivered a client that was designed to work for me instead of try and obnoxiously sell me shit, and didn't monitor the communications then I'd actually be inclined to trust them, and wouldn't object to the fact that all all it has is "proprietary encryption" and a central server.
Re:I guess Minecraft will stop using it by UnknownSoldier · 2014-03-31 05:39 · Score: 1

Agreed. ZFS holistic approach of file system, volume manager, and RAID is beautiful, and safer to boot (pardon the pun!)
i.e.
* https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwi...
* https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwi...

Sounds about right by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · 2014-03-27 06:13 · Score: 5, Funny

> Btrfs

tl;dr, I assume this is a button to let you tag people as a butterface?

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Re:Sounds about right by QRDeNameland · 2014-03-27 06:17 · Score: 1

I was about to say if they made a fork of btrfs for their own implementation it should obviously be called ButterFace.

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Thanks, Facebook! by bill_mcgonigle · 2014-03-27 06:16 · Score: 3, Insightful

FB admins - thank you for paying the developers for the open source work they do. I've been using flashcache with great success in one deployment for almost two years now and am looking to start with hhvm. I didn't even know about the block work.

Obviously kudos to the developers too for spending valuable years on it as well.

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My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)

Re: Thanks, Facebook! by Zero__Kelvin · 2014-03-27 08:09 · Score: 1

You are assuming a mutual exclusion where there is none. Some F/OSS developers get paid for their efforts and some work on projects on their own time and done. Still others do a mixture of both.

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Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Re:Thanks, Facebook! by s.petry · 2014-03-27 08:47 · Score: 1

While I'll agree that there a few companies that only take advantage of Open Source work, I happen to work for and know several that have full time developers working on nothing but Open Source projects as their full time job. (No, I dislike Facebook and would probably never work there).
I have no idea why so many people try and paint everything as black or white. The world is grey, enjoy it!!

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-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Re:Thanks, Facebook! by Zontar+The+Mindless · 2014-03-29 01:43 · Score: 1

Where I work, a couple hundred developers and I get paid to work on nothing but GPL software. And that's just our project (which I'll not name, but believe me, it's pretty much everywhere). There's at least that many more getting paid for working on other FOSS projects including the Linux kernel. And it is not a company that people normally associate with FOSS--quite the opposite, in fact.

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Il n'y a pas de Planet B.

Trial by fire... by mlts · 2014-03-27 06:19 · Score: 3, Insightful

IMHO, this is a very good thing. btrfs doesn't have as many capabilities that ZFS or Storage Spaces/ReFS possesses.

However, it is finally time that Linux has a filesystem that supports the latest/greatest enterprise features (deduplication and the ability to combat bit rot.)

Realistically, it would be nice to see the native (not FUSE based) code from OpenZFS be included as an alternative, but the CDDL/GPL conflicts likely will make this a no-go.

Re:Trial by fire... by mcrbids · 2014-03-27 06:34 · Score: 5, Informative

Realistically, it would be nice to see the native (not FUSE based) code from OpenZFS be included as an alternative, but the CDDL/GPL conflicts likely will make this a no-go.
Well, isn't this your lucky day, then? ZFS on Linux works now, today, without the use of FUSE. Nothing about the license conflicts prohibits use or distribution, just distribution together. I have ZFS/Linux servers in production right now, and they are quite stable. Starting with a vanilla install of CentOS, the instructions are roughly:
1) Install the yum repo file.
2) yum Install kernel-devel zfs
3) Start the ZFS service.
4) Start creating ZFS volumes....
A reboot isn't typically necessary... (though not a bad idea)

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I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Re:Trial by fire... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-03-27 06:48 · Score: 1

Running zfsonlinux here for everything except / and /boot. The last officially supported Linux version is 3.11. I am guessing (hoping) that 0.6.3, the next version of zfsonlinux, will be released soon after Linux 3.14 (with support commensurate support). If you're OK waiting a few kernel versions, or you're OK running HEAD, you'll be happy with zfsonlinux. It has been very stable for me, though I throw a ton of ECC ram at it (like you're supposed to).
Re:Trial by fire... by mlts · 2014-03-27 07:06 · Score: 1

I appreciate that link. That is very useful. It would be nice if it was part of EPEL directly. I thought the ZFS development was dead on this, but apparently there was a release last August.
Re:Trial by fire... by unixisc · 2014-03-27 07:37 · Score: 2

If FB needed ZFS, wouldn't they have gone for FreeBSD? The cleanest up to date OS that supports this file system? If they're going w/ BTRFS, they might as well go w/ Linux.
Re:Trial by fire... by UnknownSoldier · 2014-03-27 07:54 · Score: 4, Informative

> Personally I would be *EXTREMELY* wary of running ZFS on Linux.
So basically you are making an decision based on emotion instead of actual facts??
Try reading the FAQ next time:
http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html...
Re:Trial by fire... by SirMasterboy · 2014-03-27 08:26 · Score: 3, Informative

Check out: http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Main_...
http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/20...
ZoL is very active and very up-to-date. All the versions and compatibility is in sync with Illumos (the main source of OpenZFS) and FreeBSD. You can create and move zpools between these 3 platforms seamlessly.
2 of the main founders and creators of ZFS itself (who used to work for Oracle and wrote ZFS) who now work for Delphix and continue to improve OpenZFS (started with the last open release of Oracle ZFS) in Illumos and have actually made it better than the now closed Oracle ZFS.
See how OpenZFS is actually better than Oracle ZFS now:
http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/20...
Actively adding new features: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/... (Largeblock support to match the newer Oracle ZFS)
Etc...
Maybe if we pray to the ZFS gods Matthew will start implementing block pointer rewrite some day!
Anyways, OpenZFS is very active and kicking, and that includes the Linux port.
Re:Trial by fire... by jxander · 2014-03-27 08:34 · Score: 2

A reboot isn't typically necessary... (though not a bad idea)
What is this? Windows?

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Re:Trial by fire... by Solandri · 2014-03-27 08:52 · Score: 1

How has performance been? I ran zfsonlinux for a few months 2-3 years ago, and on a single redundancy zvol with compression on I could never get sustained data transfer rates over the network (using samba) above about 35 MB/s. I switched to ZFS on FreeBSD and it easily hits 60-100 MB/s. (This is with deduplication off. While dedup is a great idea in theory, I have never seen such a performance hog. It dropped my transfer rates to about 15, 8, and 2 MB/s for best, average, and worst case. And yes before I gave up, I tried giving it 8 GB of RAM for my ~1 TB storage pool devoted to stuff that could benefit from dedup. Using a better compression algorithm has worked better that dedup for me.)

I'm curious how well the project has progressed. I thought of trying btrfs but the "experimental" warnings scared me off - I just wanted something that works. The weird thing was zfsonlinux was faster at reads that writes. ZFS on FreeBSD has been faster at writes than reads.
Re:Trial by fire... by s.petry · 2014-03-27 09:00 · Score: 2

Well, since ZFS is available for Linux I had to wonder why there would be people making a fuss about btrfs. You bring up licensing which is an issue, and I'm guessing Oracle did not help the license issues, or possibly made the license issues worse.

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-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Re:Trial by fire... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-03-27 09:20 · Score: 1

Seriously. I've been running ZFS on Linux for 2 years and it's as stable as it ever was on Solaris. I'm 100% confident in it for even Production use.
Re:Trial by fire... by styrotech · 2014-03-27 09:26 · Score: 1

I would think licensing wouldn't be much of an issue. Facebook probably maintain their own internal custom linux distro. GPL incompatibility between ZFS and the kernel presumably wouldn't be a problem as they wouldn't be distributing it to anyone else.
I could be wrong though :)
Re:Trial by fire... by s.petry · 2014-03-27 09:43 · Score: 1

I happen to use ZFS and have really enjoyed it since it came stock in Solaris 10. I really never paid attention to btrfs, no need to do so.

--
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Re:Trial by fire... by rev0lt · 2014-03-27 09:49 · Score: 1

A nice alternative to ZFS Dedup (or so I heard) is DragonFly's HammerFS. Matt uses a compromising approach that is less taxing on resources.
Re:Trial by fire... by Rich0 · 2014-03-27 12:04 · Score: 1

IMHO, this is a very good thing. btrfs doesn't have as many capabilities that ZFS or Storage Spaces/ReFS possesses.
Beyond maturity, what is actually missing? When I look at the feature lists for both if anything it seems like btrfs has more features, like being able to reshape a raid. The last time I checked ZFS supported adding or removing a raid from a zpool, but not adding or removing individual drives from a raid (without degrading it). That is, you can't turn a 4-drive raid5 into a 5-drive raid5 without adding 5 drives and then removing 4.
I'm certainly willing to believe btrfs is missing something, but it has a number of features already (though some aren't as ready for production use - for example I'd probably avoid raid 5/6 for the time being).
Re:Trial by fire... by Rich0 · 2014-03-27 12:08 · Score: 1

Well, since ZFS is available for Linux I had to wonder why there would be people making a fuss about btrfs. You bring up licensing which is an issue, and I'm guessing Oracle did not help the license issues, or possibly made the license issues worse.
Well, for starters btrfs plans to have features I need, like reshaping RAID, while ZFS has no plans (that I'm aware of) to add this feature. No, I'm not talking about adding/removing raid from a zpool - I'm talking about adding/removing drives from a RAID while maintaining redundancy while the filesystem is online. mdadm supports this, and so does btrfs (though doing anything with raid5/6 on btrfs is risky right now).
The main strength of ZFS is its maturity/stability. Feature-wise, I'm sure it does somethings btrfs lacks, but when you look at the planned feature lists btrfs seems likely to surpass it at some point.
And of course there is the license - ZFS will never be in the mainstream kernel unless Oracle re-licenses it or somebody re-writes it (and in so doing ditches the maturity which is its main advantage).
Re:Trial by fire... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-03-27 13:27 · Score: 1

RAID 5/6 is exactly what is needed. The industry seems to swing from advanced hardware RAID to having the OS handle this task. There was a time back in the Ultra 450 days when one had to have Veritas's LVM software because Sun machines would ship as "dumb" JBOD without a hardware controller... then the world moved to SANs, from there to cloud storage, and from there (now that SAN prices are through the stratosphere) back to having the OS do the striping/RAID.
It is good for an OS/filesystem to have this capability anyway. On higher end systems, I have moved production database data (after backing them up of course) from one SAN to another by creating a mirror on the newly present disks, waiting until the OS has finished mirroring, breaking the mirror, then dropping the presented volume on the old array. There was a performance hit, but it was not that great. Without at least RAID 1 in the OS, moving the filesystems would have almost definitely required downtime.
Then there is the issue of bit rot. A ZFS scrub isn't just an online fsck... it goes through every single sector looking for corruption and either finding it... or if there is redundancy left, fixing it. At the minimum, it can tell you what data is damaged so you can reach for the right backup tape.
Finally there is the issue of snapshots. With ZFS, I can mount a drive, snapshot the entire system, copy that snap onto the mounted drive, dismount it and be on my way, a backup done. Linux has no ability to handle volume snapshots... something Windows has had since 2003, AIX has had since 5L, and Solaris has had since 10. Snapshotting active volumes for backups is functionality that at the minimum, brings Linux into this decade.
Admittedly, I've been using Linux since the SLS/MCC days. However, where Linux absolutely lacks is an enterprise grade filesystem. I'm glad Facebook is putting this to the test and helping the OS actually get something that keeps it up with BSD, Solaris... hell, even Windows Server 2012 R2 that has built in autotiering if you have SSD in your disk pool.
Re:Trial by fire... by sjames · 2014-03-27 13:45 · Score: 1

I have been evaluating both recently. In the end, btrfs is mostly to be more capable. I say to be because at the moment, it is not yet mature and some of those capabilities are either absent or not working properly, especially RAID >0. ZFS seems much more mature and it's capabilities work now.
Neither lost data in my brief tests where I abused them with hard resets and disappearing drives (in a VM). However, btrfs got to a point where anything touching it got stuck in the D state, so it might as well have been a crash.
Re:Trial by fire... by Rich0 · 2014-03-27 15:01 · Score: 1

RAID 5/6 is exactly what is needed.
Btrfs supports RAID 5/6, with reshaping (ZFS does not support the latter).

Then there is the issue of bit rot. A ZFS scrub isn't just an online fsck... it goes through every single sector looking for corruption and either finding it... or if there is redundancy left, fixing it.
Fully supported on btrfs. I do it weekly. All reads are of course checked, but a scrub checks all the disks asynchronously.

Finally there is the issue of snapshots. With ZFS, I can mount a drive, snapshot the entire system, copy that snap onto the mounted drive, dismount it and be on my way, a backup done.
Snapshots are fully supported on btrfs. You can also use send/receive with them which would be more efficient in this use case than just copying the snapshot (which copies all data and not just changes since the last snapshot).
My question was what features does ZFS have which btrfs doesn't have? All of these are btrfs features. The last two are fairly robust - raid 5/6 is pretty immature and I don't run it on my own systems yet.
Re:Trial by fire... by Rich0 · 2014-03-28 03:06 · Score: 1

I'm not sure if all of those are on the roadmap - a few are.
As I said, I think the main issue with btrfs is maturity. Btrfs "supports" raid5. Nobody sane would store anything important on it today. Etc...
I suspect that df and quota support fall into that general category of stuff that is half-done. You can add quotas after creating subvolumes, but the userspace tools don't automatically set them up for existing subvolumes today. There is no reason it couldn't do the job in the future.
Heck, just the output of the userspace tool when you look at your quotas would be vastly more useful if they just cleaned it up (mapping IDs to paths, etc).
Df is actually a bit trickier, because volume-management is a bit more flexible in btrfs compared to ZFS. A collection of 5 drives might have some files stored RAID1, and some files stored RAID5, and some of the RAID 5 files might be striped across differing numbers of drives. So, understanding how much space is in use is easy, but understanding how much is free is a bit trickier. That said, clearly it can be done better than it is today.
So, most of the issues with btrfs vs ZFS just reflect that the former isn't quite done yet. They're not really limitations of the filesystem itself.
The one item you brought up which does concern me is encryption - it definitely is an afterthought on btrfs and it might be a long time before it is properly supported as a result.
Re:Trial by fire... by Rich0 · 2014-03-28 12:10 · Score: 1

btrfs lacks stability and reliability
Hence my original question, "Beyond maturity, what is actually missing?"

Unfortunately, the GPL-compatible ZFS ship has sai by McKing · 2014-03-27 06:30 · Score: 1

...and the ship's owner is named Larry Ellison. How do you expect him to be able to afford enough Ole Doc Washington's Patented Yacht Oil to win the America's Cup if he gives nice things away for free??

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If only "common" sense was actually that common...

Big whoop by msobkow · 2014-03-27 06:30 · Score: 1

As far as I know, the web tier is basically read-only images of the services to be run. The updates and data are on the back end.

So what, precisely, does using Btrfs in such a deployment prove? It's the stability of modified disks that is in question.

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I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.

Re:Big whoop by Anonymous Coward · 2014-03-27 07:33 · Score: 1

As far as I know, the web tier is basically read-only images of the services to be run.
The web tier will serve cached copies of user pages generated as requests arrive, and then distribute these generated pages as load increases. Given that Facebook has about 18.5% of the species actively using the service every month you can assume there are tens of thousands of page gens per minute into the web tier caches. The storage elements used to achieve that will experience very frequent writes.
Re:Big whoop by msobkow · 2014-03-27 07:56 · Score: 1

Thanks for the clarification. I hadn't considered caching.

--
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.

And facebook will be burnt by sl3xd · 2014-03-27 06:58 · Score: 2

Not that anybody'll really notice, but I have a feeling that Facebook's backup and recovery system is queuing up for a stress test.

Having lost data with BTRFS multiple times on my disk array (as recently as last month), I have no confidence in it. The best thing I can say about btrfs is is that it was able to tell me that it had lost data. Not many filesystems do that; but ZFS on Linux has been rock solid for years, and not only tells me if data has been lost, but actually preserves the data as well.

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-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.

Re:And facebook will be burnt by mlts · 2014-03-27 07:16 · Score: 3, Interesting

You are not the only person who have reported data loss on btrfs. Normally I wouldn't worry about Linux filesystems (even ext4 became rock solid after a while.) However, I worry about what I hear from people who use btrfs.
One concern is that a filesystem can't check for bit rot by itself. True bit rot checking requires at least some working with the LVM layer to check CRCs, find a damaged sector and fix it. I've read that btrfs can catch some bitrot issues, (and please correct me if wrong), but it can't catch/correct anywhere near as much as ZFS or Storage Spaces + ReFS can. btrfs also uses a 32 bit CRC, rather than a 64 bit one.
I'm hoping that Facebook's coders can find the issues with btrfs and squash them. There are not many companies with the sheer server use of FB, and if they can get it working solidly, btrfs should be more than ready for prime time for everyone else.
Re:And facebook will be burnt by mcrbids · 2014-03-27 13:01 · Score: 1

If BTRFS bit rot detection is anything like ZFS' then it most certainly can check for bit rot and correct it automatically.

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I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.

Btrfs definition by PHPNerd · 2014-03-27 07:00 · Score: 4, Informative

From wikipedia: Btrfs (B-tree file system) is a GPL-licensed experimental copy-on-write file system for Linux. (I'm sure a lot of people were wondering what it is, since TFA doesn't say)

Re:Btrfs definition by dargaud · 2014-03-27 07:53 · Score: 2

I hope the /. wannabes that'll spring up when beta goes into production will enforce the explicit declaration of all acronyms in the summary...

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Non-Linux Penguins ?
Re:Btrfs definition by petermgreen · 2014-03-27 16:01 · Score: 1

btrfs brings really useful features like data integrity protection through the combination of checksums with either multiple copies or error correction codes*, snapshotting** and the ability to create a logical copy of a file without creating a physical copy. These are features that most other linux fileystems don't have. You can find out more at https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/...
Unfortunately it's hard to take a filesystem, particularly a complex one like btrfs from "seems to work fine under our lab tests" to "proven stable in production" . devs need data from real world problems to improve the filesystem but to get data from real world problems requires people to run it on real world systems but people are reluctant to put an experimental filesystem on their production servers.
This is good news towards the goal of turning btrfs into a "proven stable in production" soloution.
* The trouble with conventional raid is it keeps multiple effective copies but it has no idea which of those copies is correct. So it relies on the underlying drives to return either correct data or an error code. Experiance has shown that the checksum systems built into drives are not strong enough to completely prevent bad data from being returned.
** Yes you can do snapshotting with a layer like lvm between the filesystem and the storage but there are distinct advantages to doing it as part of the filesystem.

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note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register

What difference would the GPL make to ZFS? by sl3xd · 2014-03-27 07:06 · Score: 1

It would be the biggest "fuck you" in the history of open source if ORACLE licensed ZFS as GPLv3 only, as the license would still be incompatible with the Linux Kernel.

The whole reason the CDDL was chosen by Sun was to be incompatible with GPLv2. Oddly enough, the GPLv3 is incompatible with GPLv2 as well.

From a license persepective, it makes no useful difference, as you'd taint the kernel with an incompatible license to run the code whether it's GPLv3 or CDDL.

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-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.

And an active development... by sl3xd · 2014-03-27 07:09 · Score: 1

It also has an active development community; the git repo has regular and frequent commits (for a filesystem). ZFS on Linux seems to test more and release less often -- a fact I appreciate as I haven't lost a single bit of data on my ZFS filesystems, but have lost entire btrfs filesystems multiple times. (Yeah, sure, btrfs is "experimental" and will eat your data... so why is Facebook even thinking about using it?)

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-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.

Re:And an active development... by mlts · 2014-03-27 07:32 · Score: 1

btrfs has been "experimental" for quite a long time (2009?) To compare, Linux went from MINIX's filesystem to ext2 in two years, which lasted quite a while. It takes time to get a filesystem going, but five years is almost an eternity in the computer world, and realistically, Linux should have chucked the LVM2/ext4 combination long ago for ZFS or something ZFS-like.
The good thing is that with FB's devs hammering on btrfs, that will do nothing but improve things and get btrfs ready for prime time use in the enterprise.

There may be, but... by sl3xd · 2014-03-27 07:11 · Score: 1

There may be such a button, but since the code will be stored on btrfs, it'll corrupt itself in a few months and disappear.

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-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.

Re:There may be, but... by AzTechGuy · 2014-03-27 07:28 · Score: 1

Isn't it still considered unstable? Maybe they think they can change it and make it stable?
Re:There may be, but... by Zontar+The+Mindless · 2014-03-29 01:28 · Score: 1

That'll work only if it really, truly wants to change.

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Il n'y a pas de Planet B.

Re:hhvm by Anomalyst · 2014-03-27 07:42 · Score: 1

http://hhvm.com/ from TFSite "an open-source virtual machine designed for executing programs written in Hack and PHP. HHVM uses a just-in-time (JIT) compilation approach to achieve superior performance while maintaining the development flexibility that PHP provides."

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There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.

Re:Not next gen by UnknownSoldier · 2014-03-27 07:56 · Score: 1

next-gen is just marketing propaganda for "new, untested, and hype because it is not old 'X' "

Re:btrfs? by UnknownSoldier · 2014-03-27 08:05 · Score: 4, Interesting

LOL, nice! Or ...

* Broken To Read Free Space
* Broken Treatment Reading Free Space

btrfs FAQ 4.4 - 4.8
* 4.4 Why does df show incorrect free space for my RAID volume?
* 4.5 Aaargh! My filesystem is full, and I've put almost nothing into it!
* 4.6 Why are there so many ways to check the amount of free space?
* 4.6.1 Raw disk usage
* 4.6.2 Actual data
* 4.7 Why is free space so complicated?
* 4.8 Why is there so much space overhead?
https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/...

--
Microsoft Windows 8: A 64-bit compilation of 32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor written by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition with 0 bit of understanding good UI.

Re:Not next gen by TeknoHog · 2014-03-27 09:38 · Score: 1

next-gen is just marketing propaganda for "new, untested, and hype because it is not old 'X' "

I understand that may apply to Wayland or Mir, but not filesystems, unless you refer to XFS :D

Also, I understand that ZFS is not just a filesystem, as it also covers the functionalities of volume management, kitchen sink, life, the universe, everything, and emacs. Btrfs is a filesystem in the unix philosophy (unless the name refers to 'butterflysystem', in which case it covers all aforementioned functionalities and then some).

--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.

Re:Unfortunately, the GPL-compatible ZFS ship has by rev0lt · 2014-03-27 09:45 · Score: 3, Informative

Larry, really? The guy from the same company who actually STARTED btrfs? That's right, btrfs *is* an Oracle project. Some other big names came onboard later on, but it started there... Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Re:btrfs? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-03-27 09:55 · Score: 1

Microsoft Windows 8: A 64-bit compilation of 32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor written by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition with 0 bit of understanding good UI.

I am no windows fan but this hoary old cut-and-paste Microsoft/x86 slam is the dumbest fucking ahistorical bullshit and you should be ashamed of repeating it.

1. No part of the x86 family's lineage was ever 4-bit. Despite what you may have heard (from idiots), there is essentially zero compatibility on any level between the 4004 and 8086. There isn't even true compatibility between the 8080 and 8086: although the 8086 was designed to make it easy to port 8-bit 8080 software, Intel did this exclusively at the assembly source code level. Binaries weren't compatible at all. It was, more or less, "Hey, we've got this new 16-bit CPU, but we'll give you 8080-compatible names for the lower halves of 16-bit registers, and 8080-compatible instructions, so if your ASM program only ever uses the 8-bit register names it'll mostly work the same". You still had to make some alterations but much of the program could be used as-is.

2. Even in an alternate reality where the 4004 had a real relationship with x86, QDOS / MS-DOS never ran on it. The 4004 was a calculator and stoplight controller. It never ran anything we'd recognize as an OS. It couldn't address enough memory to do that.

3. No part of the Windows OS lineage was ever 8-bit. The 8086/8088 were 16-bit CPUs with a 20-bit address space, and MS-DOS treated them as such from the very beginning. There has never been a "16-bit patch". If you want to shame Microsoft for something real related to bit depth, do it for how long it took them to ship a 32-bit version of Windows. (386: 1985. Windows '95: 1995. Took them a decade. Shameful.)

4. As of Win 95, it wasn't merely a graphical shell for DOS anymore. If you believe that, sorry, you are wrong.

5. Modern Windows (XP onwards on the consumer side) is derived from Windows NT, which was a completely new OS written from scratch. It is pure unalloyed deliberate thickheadedness to claim that NT is that list of stupid you copypasted -- they made a clean break at the core, and wrote wrapper layers to keep old software working.

....and nothing of value was lost by rainer_d · 2014-03-27 10:41 · Score: 1

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

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Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin

Re:btrfs? by UnknownSoldier · 2014-03-27 10:44 · Score: 1

1. Sarcasm.
2. Whoosh.
3. MS-DOS, aka, 86-DOS, shares some of the same design of 8-bit CP/M.

"MS-DOS was a renamed form of 86-DOS. ... Development of 86-DOS took only six weeks, as it was basically a clone of Digital Research's CP/M (for 8080/Z80 processors)"

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Do you understand what a File Control Block is??

The FCB originates from CP/M and is also present in most variants of DOS, ... The following fields have consistent meanings:
0x00 Drive number
0x01 File name & type
0x0C implementation dependent
0x20 record numer sequential access
0x21 record number random access

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

4. a) Incorrect.

For example, it is possible to prevent loading the graphical user interface and boot the system into a real-mode MS-DOS environment. This sparked debate amongst users and professionals over the question of to what extent Windows 95 is an operating system or merely a graphical shell running on top of MS-DOS.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
Also,
* http://web.archive.org/web/201...
b) Win95 contained 16-bit code
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

5. I am quite familiar with the history of Dave Cutler's WinNT 3.1, WinNT 4.0, Win 2000 (aka NT 5.0), WinXP (NT 5.1), Vista (NT 6.0), WIn7 (NT 6.1), and Win8 (NT 6.3) having run/used all of them.

Regardless you completely missed the joke.

Humor. You should try it sometime, instead of being so uptight. You'll live longer, healthier, and happier.

--
First (Public) Contact is coming 2024. Are you prepared for a new larger perspective in the Universe?

Re:Not next gen by Rich0 · 2014-03-27 12:11 · Score: 1

Btrfs is fairly comparable to ZFS in terms of capabilities/architecture. Personally I tend to prefer the design (devices go directly into pools - you don't have to designate groupings of devices into RAID/etc). Each has some feature the other lacks, but ZFS is more mature.

Ultimately btrfs seems likely to replace ext4 some day, though that day could be quite a ways off. ZFS is unlikely to do so unless the license issue is overcome - sure, you can use it, but there will always be a drive to have the #1 general-purpose filesystem be one that is actually in the mainline kernel.

Re:Not next gen by entrigant · 2014-03-27 12:45 · Score: 1

How is it a filesystem in the unix philsophy? It's monolithic in the worst possible way; a clumsy mess of layering violations. One analogy would be if someone said "http would be so much better if it wasn't for those pesky tcp, ip, and ethernet layers!"

I remain bitter that all of that work into advanced data protection, volume management, and efficiency features was wasted on a single filesystem instead of placed in device mapper where they belong. Then ext4 could have useful features such dedupe, load balancing, compression, etc. Hell, if proper layer constraints and software design were used FAT16 could have these features!

Shame on ZFS, shame on BTRFS, and shame on the community for supporting these abominations.

Re:Not next gen by Wolfrider · 2014-03-30 19:40 · Score: 1

--You sound like a Luddite. Sure, in a blue-sky world ALL filesystems could have ZFS capabilities. But the ZFS implementors decided to get past all the cruft and implement it from scratch, and for the most part they've done a fantastic job. Quit complaining and being bitter and try FUNDING CODE DEVELOPMENT on the dev mapper subsystem if you want to see it happen in the next 5-10 years, or it likely never will - it's easier right now to keep those features at the FS level. LVM(+RAID) on Linux is a *horrible* hack in comparison to ZFS.

--Btrfs is playing catch-up tho; realistically I prolly wouldn't trust it entirely for the next 1.5 - 2 years, but it does have some things that ZFS lacks (more flexibility, and supposedly stable on 32-bit systems.) Once it matures it will be a fine alternative/complement to ZFS, and *damn* the layering violations - as long as it Just Works.

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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??

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