

SUSE Linux says Btrfs is ready for production use, now officially supported - bitcartel
http://www.linux.com/news/enterprise/systems-management/677226-suse-linux-says-btrfs-is-ready-to-rock

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rwmj
I filed this serious bug in btrfs about 2 months ago, and nothing has been
done about it. This worries me.

<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=863978>

~~~
rlpb
You:

1) Appear to be the only one affected by it. 2) Don't have exact steps to
reproduce it.

This makes it very difficult for anybody apart from you to work on the issue.

> nothing has been done about it.

From the bug, it looks like lots has been done about it.

> This worries me.

I think this is justified for you, but has little bearing on others. Software
projects are full of bugs that only appear to affect one person. These bugs
make little progress but don't necessarily reflect on the general quality of
the software. Admittedly it is more of a concern on something like a
filesystem, but I am still skeptical.

~~~
rwmj
(a) It's easy to reproduce. There are exact steps in the bug and in the
mailing list thread. In fact, the steps are so simple I'll tell you what they
are: (1) Run mkfs.btrfs, (2) Run any btrfs command on the filesystem. Put (1)
+ (2) into a shell script so they run immediately after each other. Put a loop
around it so it tries over and over again. Bang => data corruption.

(b) It's a data corrupter. That should be an immediate "stop everything" red
flag (for a serious filesystem at least).

 _Edit:_ Rereading this comment, I sound like I'm being very negative about
btrfs. I just want to say that I really want btrfs to work, because it's based
on very sound principles. I've also offered to help immediately testing any
proposed patches for this bug.

~~~
nnnnni
Wait, why would you format the fs, do something with it, format the fs, do
something with it, and so on? Isn't one pass enough?

~~~
rwmj
Because it's a test designed to reproduce a bug. We hit the bug all the time
in libguestfs which spends much of its time formatting filesystems and
immediately using them, but it doesn't happen 100% of the time. It's a race
condition somewhere.

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zorlem
I think that SUSE are trying to differentiate themselves by supporting Btrfs,
which is a nice move on their part. Btrfs extensive features can be very
useful in quite a few scenarios, so its wider adoption is more than welcome. I
know quite a few people that have been longing for ZFS's functionality for
years and Btrfs provides the most important (IMHO) ones.

For some time Btrfs has been rapidly stabilizing and I expect the other
distros to jump ship and provide support as well.

~~~
jrussbowman
Redhat is supposed to support it with version 7. I believe Oracle already
supports it.

iirc Suse isn't supporting all the features yet, such as compression.

I really tried to go zfs for enterprise nfs at work and have decided to wait
until Redhat 7 and btrfs. various problems with solaris and x86 hardware from
hp while not getting the support iI needed internally to do zfs for linux.
btrfs still has catch up to do. Last iI heard data De duplication isn't sted
yet. No block level send/receive like zfs, btrfs send/receive is different.

sorry for typos typed on my phone

~~~
laumars
I run ZFS on FreeBSD (have done for a few years now) and quite frankly I think
it's a seriously overlooked alternative.

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Erwin
"Alternative" is an understatement. ZFS's block-level deduping and compression
are great and they were here years ago.

It's disappointing the licensing problems cannot be solved -- great as it is,
I cannot really use it until it's a supported part of RHEL.

~~~
bsg75
I know it is not the same as a supported module, but zfsonlinux.org has been
reliable for me on a CentOS 6 dev box. Of course as an RC, I would not deploy
it in production, but I have high hopes.

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DASD
Does anyone know the reasoning for Ext3 to be supported but not Ext4?

From the article, "A notable omission is Ext4; read-only functionality is
supported for migrating to a different filesystem. Full read-write support is
available with the ext4-writeable KMPkernel module from the SLES11-Extras
repository, but it is not supported."

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ars
Ext3 is basically the venerable ext2 plus journaling. It's not a dramatic
change.

Ext4 is more or less a rewrite.

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tytso
That's not true. The changes from ext4 to ext3 are evolutionary, not
revolutionary. There is full backwards compatibility, and there's still a lot
of the original ext3 code in ext4 (in particular, we still support old-
fashioned indirect blocks in ext4, even though it's not the default, and we do
that using a copy of the ext3 code).

If you look in the git history, you can see all of the changes as we added new
features into ext3 during the course of the ext4 development.

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hapless
SuSE was also the first distribution to embrace ReiserFS, only to find it
inadequate.

I seem to recall that SuSE used to talk about adopting OCFS2 as its primary
filesystem. Thank goodness they didn't go that direction.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Why was it inadequate? Perhaps it is not well supported anymore but I haven't
heard it called inadequate before.

~~~
jmgao
It had problems with wife fragmentation.

~~~
nnq
probably the "worst" joke I've read on HN... but still I can't stop laughing

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__david__
I decided to run a couple partitions on several computer with btrfs about a
year or so ago. At some point I noticed that things were going _really_ slow.
I ended replacing all my btrfs partitions with lvm + xfs a couple months ago.

It made me sad because I loved the design ideas behind btrfs and really wanted
it to be great. But right now with lvm and xfs I have a very stable and fast
system (we're talking an order of magnitude faster--seriously).

I think SUSE is crazy to call it ready at this point.

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Scramblejams
This is a nice development even for those of us not using SUSE -- I like
Btrfs, I'm looking forward to using it, but I won't trust it with my own data
until it's been dubbed "production ready" and used that way in the wild for
several years. Glad the clock's started ticking for Btrfs on a major distro.

~~~
mercurial
Same here. There are some kinds of software I'm not comfortable experimenting
with - or at least not experimenting with using valuable data.

------
artsrc
Does anyone know what the story with file systems and SSD's is?

Google did made it clear that some tuning makes sense for SSD's, but did not
make it clear whether the various file systems are more or less suited to
SSD's.

~~~
naner
Btrfs and Ext4 work fine with tuning (enabling TRIM, partition alignment,
etc.[1][2]).

Samsung is working on a log-structured file system designed with SSDs in mind
called F2FS[3]. There is also NILFS (also log-structured) which has been
around for awhile[4].

I would stick with Ext4+TRIM for now on a personal laptop.

1: [http://superuser.com/questions/228657/which-linux-
filesystem...](http://superuser.com/questions/228657/which-linux-filesystem-
works-best-with-ssd)

2: <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_State_Drives>

3: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2FS>

4: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639762>

~~~
throwaway2048
these solid state specific file systems are not intended for use on the types
of ssds you buy to plug into a SATA port, those are already heavily abstracted
by their firmware, which handles stuff like wear leveling and block
deallocation.

These types of filesystems are intended for when the kernel has access to the
raw addressing of the flash chips themselves, such as on some cellphones and
embedded devices. They handle stuff like wear leveling, and deleting blocks.

~~~
ibotty
i think you are confusing f2fs and nilfs which work with regular block devices
(including ssds, but also cheaper flash (and also poorly regular harddrives))
with jffs(2) which will only work on raw flash.

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wildchild
<https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Btrfsck>

I am wondering how it's ready for production use.

~~~
anon987
Google 'zfs no fsck' (no quotes) and you'll find many reasons why it's not
needed.

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nodata
Why not tell him the reasons, rather than saying "reasons exist, go look for
them yourself"?

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batgaijin
I thought it was shitty for databases. Is that still true? I forget what
version I heard that for, but it was at least a year ago.

~~~
rwmj
It has notably poor performance for virtual machine disk images. These require
large amount of in-place changes, which simply isn't what it's good for. I've
not tried databases, but I imagine it could be bad for them, for the same
reasons.

~~~
bhdn
So why would Oracle support it?

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rwmj
Presumably because Oracle wants you to use ASMlib / raw disks / O_DIRECT to
partitions, and wouldn't support Oracle database on btrfs. Btrfs is for their
RHEL clone OS. Big company, different departments ...

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darklajid
I'd like to look at btrfs, but right now I really want a raidz. I understand
btrfs cannot (can it?) help me in any way here.

~~~
StavrosK
Yeah, it can't. I'm going with ZFS for the same reason.

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TallGuyShort
I believe Oracle also supports btrfs already.

