more here: http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20130415#qa interesting but not a must-have for me at he moment, as i use disk imaging to safeguard my data.
What outstanding problems does Btrfs solve, what does it do significantly better than EXT4 ? EXT4 is reliable enough for my uses, I have had zero problems with data loss since I started using it when it became default in Ubuntu, how exactly can that be improved ? EXT4 comes with far better tested tools (for checking and diagnosing problems as restoring an image does not reduce the chances of same issue happening again unless you can investigate the cause). EXT4 performs well on mobile devices, does Btrfs work well with suspend/hibernate, how much battery/cpu does it use ? Does it have any side effects (like constant disc activity) ? LVM already allows you to add additional phyiscal drives, map them to logical drives and then extend the EXT4 partition. "but snapshots" - why? I already run incremental backups of my data to external devices which is safer for my data than local snapshots. Rsync and a GUI tool already provides the ability for me to browse through earlier snapshots of my data. Cheers, Nick
tnx for the heads-up Nick! i noticed openSUSE is offering BTRFS as an option during the install but i decided to stick with ext4 for the moment. at least until the dust settles over this. cheers m8!
I think Btrfs will be a good successor, EXT4 was a bit of a band-aid over EXT3 and does have limitations which at the moment are not an issue but will be in the future and Btrfs will be well tested and stable by then to take over. Its also worth keeping an eye on XFS, they have already started introducing meta data checksums for improved file system reliability compared to EXT4/current XFS, still has excellent proven scalability and reliability over recent years compared to EXT4 (less performance regressions, interesting bugs occurring). Cheers, Nick.
I favour zfs, as it has pretty basically everything you'd ever need. It's configurable with snapshots, checksumming, compression, deduplication etc and is extremely easy to manage. It could be too much for some uses, but even as a root fs the snapshots work amazingly fast (split second to roll back) which is really useful for testing stuff, although I switched back root for ext4 as it's cleaner having it in the kernel (no initramfs needed), and more compatible with everything else, and use zfs only for the data drives. I have only played with btrfs a bit so can't comment on that, but both zfs and ext4 have been very fast and reliable file systems for me. Might try a btrfs root next I like playing with stuff
Here is a nice detailed example of why Btrfs is not production ready... Btrfs backup experiment: http://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2013/04/the-btrfs-backup-experiment/ Snapshots block IO causing running backups to not be fully reliable, bug in qgroups causes CPU soft lock requiring reboot, corrupts btrfs’ free space cache, requiring a long build after the reboot. They also suffered severe slowdown as the drives neared full. Cheers, Nick
