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I've been using btrfs since 2 years (Fedora) and the only problem I've ever run into was "no space left on device", solvable with a rebalance. btrfs also surviv

by riquito 11y ago

I've been using btrfs since 2 years (Fedora) and the only problem I've ever run into was "no space left on device", solvable with a rebalance. btrfs also survived many hard poweroff.

feld 11y ago
I tried to use the mirror functionality when it was new. I tested booting with one disk missing. Errors all the way. I went into IRC and chatted with btrfs folk about the "bug". Their response? "Booting without all members of your mirror is unsupported."
- dsr_ 11y ago
  It's certainly supported now. mount -o degraded. It ought to be the default, though.
  - feld 11y ago
    if it's not default yet it's a serious bug. a server should still come up completely with one disk in a mirror.
zanny 11y ago
I'll pitch in with a neutral position. I've been using btrfs for four years, and in that time I've had unrecoverable fs corruption probably three times. This is on Arch, on bleeding edge kernels, where new releases are prone to regressions that break the filesystem. But there was a tangible progression from instability towards increasing stability. I haven't had one lick of issue with btrfs in about a dozen kernel releases. I'm close to saying I'd trust in a production environment, since I use it everywhere else as a daily driver, I would just use an LTS release version just to be safe. It is not all sunshine and roses, though. While Facebook employs several major btrfs developers, a lot of features that have been talked about for years still have not seen the light of day or any development whatsoever. lz4 compression, better checksum algorithms, per-subvolume encryption, online filesystem checking, and the Raid 5/6 support is still kind of garbage a year later. I worry that btrfs is suffering from a lack of interest in actually making the last legitimate pushes it needs, and code audits, and integration testing, to make it truly trustworthy. But at the end of the day checksum integrity and COW are basically a game changer for me in terms of data integrity.

by riquito 11y ago

I've been using btrfs since 2 years (Fedora) and the only problem I've ever run into was "no space left on device", solvable with a rebalance. btrfs also survived many hard poweroff.

feld 11y ago

I tried to use the mirror functionality when it was new. I tested booting with one disk missing. Errors all the way. I went into IRC and chatted with btrfs folk about the "bug". Their response? "Booting without all members of your mirror is unsupported."

dsr_ 11y ago
It's certainly supported now. mount -o degraded. It ought to be the default, though.
- feld 11y ago
  if it's not default yet it's a serious bug. a server should still come up completely with one disk in a mirror.

zanny 11y ago

I'll pitch in with a neutral position. I've been using btrfs for four years, and in that time I've had unrecoverable fs corruption probably three times. This is on Arch, on bleeding edge kernels, where new releases are prone to regressions that break the filesystem. But there was a tangible progression from instability towards increasing stability. I haven't had one lick of issue with btrfs in about a dozen kernel releases. I'm close to saying I'd trust in a production environment, since I use it everywhere else as a daily driver, I would just use an LTS release version just to be safe. It is not all sunshine and roses, though. While Facebook employs several major btrfs developers, a lot of features that have been talked about for years still have not seen the light of day or any development whatsoever. lz4 compression, better checksum algorithms, per-subvolume encryption, online filesystem checking, and the Raid 5/6 support is still kind of garbage a year later. I worry that btrfs is suffering from a lack of interest in actually making the last legitimate pushes it needs, and code audits, and integration testing, to make it truly trustworthy. But at the end of the day checksum integrity and COW are basically a game changer for me in terms of data integrity.