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the thing about ZFS is that it was an actual selling/functioning product before btrfs was in development (links at end). There always were people using it - whe
by barkingcat 10y ago
the thing about ZFS is that it was an actual selling/functioning product before btrfs was in development (links at end). There always were people using it - whether through the main Sun/Oracle Solaris product or via one of the OpenSolaris / illumos / Freebsd / Bsd continuations.
Btrfs was not an fs in wide production use the way xfs or ext3 / ext4 were, so it's understandable that btrfs progress is slow. The two pieces of software are just really far apart in timelines and maturity. People are paying attention to ZFS mainly because it's had a history of working and functioning in production environments and in heavy load, for a decade now.
In my opinion, in order to have parity with ZFS, some big distribution (bigger than Suse, maybe Debian or Ubuntu) needs to set btrfs as its default fs, and have banks, stock exchanges, dns providers, virtual hosting companies, etc hammer the hell out of it for another 6 or 7 years and get all the bugs that come out of those experiences fixed. Then people will start paying attention to it.
afaik btrfs development started 2007 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs)
ZFS was introduced as a part of Solaris in 2005, released as openZFS in 2006 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS)
- Twirrim 10y agoHonestly... I don't trust btrfs at the moment. It has had some nasty data losing bugs in it in the past, and admittedly its been a while since I heard of one, but it's also not often that you'll hear of someone actually using it in production. Even their wiki page is woefully lacking in examples with which to sell it: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Production_Users https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Production_Users. I want to like it, we really need a nice, stable next-generation file system in Linux land (that doesn't have the licensing issues associated with ZFS)
- mjevans 10y agoI do like it. However I am very wary of using the advanced features (beyond the de-fragmentation/scrubbing/balance kind) without a /good/ backup of the data on the system and a good retention policy. It has been my experience with using BTRFS for my own personal data that it's the less tested code paths which had / might have the issues you're describing. Things like sparse files (I got bit by this bug), snapshots (regular scrubbing and backups are things you're doing already right), and other features that are less frequently used. A small production cluster where I work uses XFS over BTRFS though, because of the very FUD that's mentioned and the type of storage happening on it matching the sparse pattern (even though that bug should be fixed).
- colejohnson66 10y agoIIRC, Linus Media Group uses btrfs for a few of their servers. But, as shown by some of their videos, they aren't the best when it comes to good practice...