Hi all -
Over the past year, btrfs has received substantial attention in the
areas of both stability and performance. I’ve been running it,
personally, on a 4 TB data volume as well as my root partitions for my
openSUSE 12.2/12.3 systems. I’ve been able to do stress tests like a
long fsmark run simultaneously with creating and removing snapshots
(with syncs to force them to disk) and haven’t run into any issues.
David Sterba, who’s been leading the charge at SUSE for btrfs stability
has likewise regularly run it through an array of torture tests and has
found that problems are occurring a whole lot less frequently than they
have in the past. The upstream btrfs community in which we participate
has also started focusing less on feature development and more on
stability and performance.
But these are only anecdotal data points from two file system guys and
if my experiences working for a major operating systems vendor have
taught me anything, it’s that our users can be a lot more creative at
finding ways to break things than we are.
So, I’d like to hear your stories. What’s worked for you? What hasn’t
worked? What would you consider the pain points with using btrfs?
Lastly, I’d like to ask that you take the opportunity to test with the
latest openSUSE Factory kernel running 3.10-final. 12.3 used the 3.7
kernel since it was the most recent release going into the beta cycle
and we’ve seen a bunch of btrfs fixes since that release.
I look forward to your feedback and the opportunity to improve btrfs for
the 13.1 release and future releases.
Thanks!
-Jeff
–
Jeff Mahoney