Btrfs seems to be stable now. Is there any reason not to use it for all volumes?
The single compelling feature for me is the checksumming/scrubbing feature. It corrects, on disk, errors that may occur. No more bit rot! Just like ECC RAM scrubbing.
I note that the utility btrfs-scrub is not among the btrfs set. Does the checksum/scrub happen automatically? If not, how is it controlled?
The only reason I see for snapshots is a highly fluid development system where the OS is constantly being modified. And the snapshot history is ridiculously high for ordinary desktop systems.
On 2015-05-09 00:56, jimoe666 wrote:
> The only reason I see for snapshots is a highly fluid development system
> where the OS is constantly being modified.
Or for documents. You can retrieve a previous version of a file.
XFS upstream implements CRC checks, too. I’m unsure if metadata or data,
and what kernel version is needed.
Part of the problem with BTRFS being default is that not all the Bells and whistles are ready and total reliably working. The Basic file system seems ok.The repair programs may still need some work and many of the fancy stuff promised like RAID and linked containers ala LVM is still missing in action at least as reliable options. You are of course free to try them but I’d not do that on a production machine.
That’s interesting…
This past month I sat in on a couple of presentations for SmartOS (an open Solaris variant) and how they’re trying to position their product as “the” premier multi-tenant OS running Linux in Solaris containers.
Of course, as a Solaris variant, it’s running on XFS (which has many fully working features maybe not yet “ready for prime time” on BTRFS) promising no undue performance hit.
I’ve run some test openSUSE in that environment just to see if there is any difficulty, although currently Debian is the only officially supported Linux distro on SmartOS at the moment. As expected, I didn’t run into any difficulties but it was only a brief “to see if it can be done” and no more.
> Of course, as a Solaris variant, it’s running on XFS (which has many
> fully working features maybe not yet “ready for prime time” on BTRFS)
> promising no undue performance hit.
I use XFS for running my VirtualBox VMs (ie, on the host for VBox VMs).
I tried btrfs, but ended up with random disk dismounts inside the VMs.