5 ms·

Why isn't Canonical using btrfs? (which is supposed to provide many or all of the features that one would want to use ZFS for, and is GPLed)

by devit 11y ago

DominoTree 11y ago
Because it still doesn't have the stability and maturity of ZFS (which has seen over a decade of production use)
- LeoPanthera 11y ago
  OpenSUSE is using it for root, so I assume they think it is stable enough. (Interestingly, they use XFS for /home)
  - DominoTree 11y ago
    Yeah, but is anybody using OpenSUSE? :P Edit: Wow, I just checked DistroWatch and they've been #4 for some time now...
    - snuxoll 11y ago
      There's a lot of interest in OpenSUSE tumbleweed from what I've gathered.
    - j_koreth 11y ago
      There are more continents using linux than America ;)
    - lmm 11y ago
      Most of Europe. At times it feels like there are almost parallel OSS ecosystems on the two sides of the Atlantic.
  - ewzimm 11y ago
    I'm using openSUSE Leap with a default partition scheme, and it's btrfs all the way down to home.
  - mitchty 11y ago
    Oh they think it, but by my experience BTRFS is crap. This year alone, its managed to "fully compress" open files to 0 bytes about 2-3 times. Why anyone uses it for / or at all right now is beyond me. I think Novell is nuts here.
  - ryao 11y ago
    The loss of data stored on the rootfs is more of an inconvenience (downtime) than something serious (permanent data loss). Consequently, the data stored elsewhere (e.g. /home) is far more important. If SUSE thought btrfs was stable enough, they would use btrfs for /home.
    - d_b 11y ago
      Suse does use Btrfs for /home..
      - ryao 11y ago
        The last that I checked, SUSE used XFS for /home and others are saying the same here. Given that you seem to have registered solely for the purpose of posting replies to me, would you care to say who you are in a manner that can be verified and provide citations, or do you just intend to troll?
ansible 11y ago
Mistake or not, I'm putting btrfs into production for a couple servers this year. All services (DNS, LDAP, NFS, DHCP) are running inside LXC containers, with btrfs as the backing store. The idea is to be able to make snapshots of containers, and use btrfs send / receive to sync those with a backup container host. So if the primary fails, the services can be quickly and easily restarted on the backup container host. So far, btrfs itself has been the main source of problems. Out of perhaps unwarranted paranoia, I often configure servers with 3-disk RAID-1 for critical data, so two drives would have to fail before a service interruption or data loss. btrfs doesn't support this... their idea of RAID-1 means that two copies of data exist. On a 3-drive btrfs RAID-1 array, if two drives fail, you are going to have problems. Rebalancing doesn't run automatically upon disk failure either. As a result, I've just gone back to a 2-drive btrfs RAID-1 config. I've had a couple problem with sending / receiving snapshots. These were eventually resolved by back-porting the 4.4 btrfs-tools package. The version in Ubuntu 16.04 should be OK for my purposes, so I won't have to worry about that so much soon. So btrfs may be OK for full production use in 2016, but significant problems exist for people using LTS distributions with older versions of the kernel code and user space tools. But yeah, I'd like to see people just put effort into btrfs, and add the concept of a volume manager to it (like with mdadm when you create an array from /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1, it can be named /dev/md0 and you can refer to that as its own thing).
ultramancool 11y ago
I'm using btrfs on ubuntu 15.10 right now and I can tell you from experience - it's unstable junk still. I have to manually rebalance my filesystem because it decides I'm out of free space and then that sometimes fails and things get even more complicated. This has really turned me off it. See here for some details of the ridiculousness: http://marc.merlins.org/perso/btrfs/post_2014-05-04_Fixing-Btrfs-Filesystem-Full-Problems.html http://marc.merlins.org/perso/btrfs/post_2014-05-04_Fixing-B...
Glyptodon 11y ago
The last time I wanted to use btrfs half the features I wanted from it weren't available unless I compiled a non-repo version myself. Needless to say I didn't bother. Possibly this has changed, but it won't be months or years until the choice comes up again for me.
barrkel 11y ago
If the did, we'd have to start finding an alternative to Ubuntu. btrfs isn't ready.
jcastro 11y ago
btrfs has been included in Ubuntu for a long time, it's not "ZFS v. btrfs", it's adding ZFS to the other supported filesystems that ship with Ubuntu.

Why isn't Canonical using btrfs? (which is supposed to provide many or all of the features that one would want to use ZFS for, and is GPLed)

by devit 11y ago

Why isn't Canonical using btrfs? (which is supposed to provide many or all of the features that one would want to use ZFS for, and is GPLed)

DominoTree 11y ago

Because it still doesn't have the stability and maturity of ZFS (which has seen over a decade of production use)

LeoPanthera 11y ago
OpenSUSE is using it for root, so I assume they think it is stable enough. (Interestingly, they use XFS for /home)
- DominoTree 11y ago
  Yeah, but is anybody using OpenSUSE? :P Edit: Wow, I just checked DistroWatch and they've been #4 for some time now...
  - snuxoll 11y ago
    There's a lot of interest in OpenSUSE tumbleweed from what I've gathered.
  - j_koreth 11y ago
    There are more continents using linux than America ;)
  - lmm 11y ago
    Most of Europe. At times it feels like there are almost parallel OSS ecosystems on the two sides of the Atlantic.
- ewzimm 11y ago
  I'm using openSUSE Leap with a default partition scheme, and it's btrfs all the way down to home.
- mitchty 11y ago
  Oh they think it, but by my experience BTRFS is crap. This year alone, its managed to "fully compress" open files to 0 bytes about 2-3 times. Why anyone uses it for / or at all right now is beyond me. I think Novell is nuts here.
- ryao 11y ago
  The loss of data stored on the rootfs is more of an inconvenience (downtime) than something serious (permanent data loss). Consequently, the data stored elsewhere (e.g. /home) is far more important. If SUSE thought btrfs was stable enough, they would use btrfs for /home.
  - d_b 11y ago
    Suse does use Btrfs for /home..
    - ryao 11y ago
      The last that I checked, SUSE used XFS for /home and others are saying the same here. Given that you seem to have registered solely for the purpose of posting replies to me, would you care to say who you are in a manner that can be verified and provide citations, or do you just intend to troll?

ansible 11y ago

Mistake or not, I'm putting btrfs into production for a couple servers this year. All services (DNS, LDAP, NFS, DHCP) are running inside LXC containers, with btrfs as the backing store. The idea is to be able to make snapshots of containers, and use btrfs send / receive to sync those with a backup container host. So if the primary fails, the services can be quickly and easily restarted on the backup container host. So far, btrfs itself has been the main source of problems. Out of perhaps unwarranted paranoia, I often configure servers with 3-disk RAID-1 for critical data, so two drives would have to fail before a service interruption or data loss. btrfs doesn't support this... their idea of RAID-1 means that two copies of data exist. On a 3-drive btrfs RAID-1 array, if two drives fail, you are going to have problems. Rebalancing doesn't run automatically upon disk failure either. As a result, I've just gone back to a 2-drive btrfs RAID-1 config. I've had a couple problem with sending / receiving snapshots. These were eventually resolved by back-porting the 4.4 btrfs-tools package. The version in Ubuntu 16.04 should be OK for my purposes, so I won't have to worry about that so much soon. So btrfs may be OK for full production use in 2016, but significant problems exist for people using LTS distributions with older versions of the kernel code and user space tools. But yeah, I'd like to see people just put effort into btrfs, and add the concept of a volume manager to it (like with mdadm when you create an array from /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1, it can be named /dev/md0 and you can refer to that as its own thing).

ultramancool 11y ago

I'm using btrfs on ubuntu 15.10 right now and I can tell you from experience - it's unstable junk still. I have to manually rebalance my filesystem because it decides I'm out of free space and then that sometimes fails and things get even more complicated. This has really turned me off it. See here for some details of the ridiculousness: http://marc.merlins.org/perso/btrfs/post_2014-05-04_Fixing-Btrfs-Filesystem-Full-Problems.html http://marc.merlins.org/perso/btrfs/post_2014-05-04_Fixing-B...

Glyptodon 11y ago

The last time I wanted to use btrfs half the features I wanted from it weren't available unless I compiled a non-repo version myself. Needless to say I didn't bother. Possibly this has changed, but it won't be months or years until the choice comes up again for me.

barrkel 11y ago

If the did, we'd have to start finding an alternative to Ubuntu. btrfs isn't ready.

jcastro 11y ago

btrfs has been included in Ubuntu for a long time, it's not "ZFS v. btrfs", it's adding ZFS to the other supported filesystems that ship with Ubuntu.