btrfs : Your opinion?

perfectpete216 · #1 26th June 2010, 10:18 PM

Hey, I wanted to post this to find out what you guys think of btrfs!

What do you think? Is it good? Bad? Qualified for default?

And I wanted to find out - what do you think would become of it? Would it be default among all Linux operating systems? Will it remain unstable?

Post your opinions

My personal opinion - I like it and all it's options! I use Fedora 13 64 bit with my root and home partitions using the B-tree FS. I do believe it has the ability to be mainstream and if it does become default with Fedora installations later on, I would certainly stick with it

marko · #2 26th June 2010, 10:38 PM

I have it on my Asus UL30Vt laptop as the root filesystem on Fedora 13 x86_64, it seems to be working fine. I probably have it on my desktop but I have so many installations I lose track. I'd think they should have it on the anaconda custom partitioner list menu in Fedora 14, but maybe not yet as the default. I suppose it depends how well the Fedora 13 experience with it goes.

perfectpete216 · #3 26th June 2010, 10:40 PM

Thats good. And I was reading an interview with the developer of the btrfs for Fedora, he plans to have it as a custom file system for partitions by Fedora 15, and hopefully have it as default around 16 and 17.

robert-e · #4 27th June 2010, 07:24 AM

Heh, I still use ext 3 with fedora. Bleeding edge fedora has had so many bugs and rough edges, that I don't trust fedora to get it right. Now, to be fair, some of these bugs and the like have been due to anaconda. OTOH, the fact that the install default is LVM, with it's attendant woes waiting for the unsuspecting, is enough for me to be wary of the devs intentions. To be fair, if I were as knowlegeable as Slowjet about LVM, perhaps it would be no problem...however...horses for courses.

Regards,
Bob

#5 27th June 2010, 08:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by robert-e

Heh, I still use ext 3 with fedora. Bleeding edge fedora has had so many bugs and rough edges, that I don't trust fedora to get it right. Now, to be fair, some of these bugs and the like have been due to anaconda. OTOH, the fact that the install default is LVM, with it's attendant woes waiting for the unsuspecting, is enough for me to be wary of the devs intentions. To be fair, if I were as knowlegeable as Slowjet about LVM, perhaps it would be no problem...however...horses for courses.

Regards,
Bob

i dont think any distro gets it right let alone Fedora.

stevea · #6 27th June 2010, 10:03 AM

I haven't used btrfs extensively yet, but it looks to have a bright future. The recent benchmarks I've seen are decent but not impressive. It's neck-n-neck with ext4 (which IMO isn't a huge improvement over ext3), Still it's been 100% solid in my minor tests in F12 and F13.

Also the 2.6.35 kernel has a new distributed file system called "Ceph" (still experimental) which preferentially uses Btrfs as the underlying file system. My fondest hope is that Ceph slaughters NFS.

perfectpete216 · #7 27th June 2010, 01:55 PM

I was actually reading yesterday that the next Ubuntu, 10.10, is going to have btrfs as a stable option, they might even incorporate it as default if they do it in time.

assen · #8 27th June 2010, 05:20 PM

Hi,

I haven't had the chance to "torture" it myself, but I frequently read another forum for professional system administrators. Their general opinion of btrfs is positive, most of the discussions go around whether/when will it be able to compete with file systems like ZFS.

WWell,

perfectpete216 · #9 27th June 2010, 07:40 PM

Hm, I can't wait to see it stable with that timeline incorporated.

Shunyata · #10 25th July 2010, 02:31 AM

I currently test it on a virtualised openSUSE and it's very stable. I don't have the time to extensively benchmark it, but I can tell you that I'm looking forward to its gold status. There are many aspects of Oracle I don't agree with, but Btrfs is a rocksolid piece of work.

perfectpete216 · #11 25th July 2010, 03:07 AM

Agreed. I currently have F13 installed, ext4 for boot and home and my root is btrfs, smartest decision I ever made

forkbomb · #12 25th July 2010, 04:16 AM

Only have a little experience with it personally, but it fell flat on itself in one very specific circumstance. It also wasn't a fair trial.

Awhile back I realized I had two ~80GB IDE drives laying around that I wasn't using. Figured I'd throw them in a software RAID0 and use it as scratch space for stuff I couldn't care less about losing. The setup goes SoftRAID (mdadm) -> LUKS dev mapper node -> filesystem.

I often preallocate the virtual disks for my most-used VMs, so I have several large files on there -- most are at least 10GB. btrfs in this configuration led to some horrible performance on VirtualBox. I didn't immediately figure out the FS was the culprit. I tried all sorts of things with VBox to try to see if that was the culprit, but couldn't see anything wrong with VBox itself. I decided to back up the VDIs and reformat as XFS because it is said to work best with large files (I've been ignoring VBox's warnings about housing VDIs on XFS file systems). Now VBox works fine.

Again, not a fair trial. They're old IDE disks in software RAID and I'm using them for a very specific purpose. Wonder if there are any outstanding issues with btrfs and large files.

perfectpete216 · #13 25th July 2010, 04:18 AM

Well, I tried btrfs with Virtualbox files, they write 8 GB files easily with no issue as far as I see.

forkbomb · #14 25th July 2010, 04:35 AM

Sure, they write them fine, but the performance when running VMs residing on VDIs on the btrfs filesystem was atrocious. The VMs would just become totally unresponsive for 10+ second periods. Took me awhile to eliminate all other possible bottlenecks as the culprit, but I don't have the same issue with XFS.

Could very well have been a fluke. It's certainly not what I'd class as an optimal physical hardware configuration (to be honest my software RAID is more or less an exercise in s&g).

perfectpete216 · #15 25th July 2010, 04:40 AM

Yea, a lot of people have issues with btrfs in a VM, I think it's because of c-o-w is on.