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What sorts of features does btrfs offer home users that ZFS lacks? My experiences with btrfs have been somewhat mixed. On OpenSuse, I've found snapper to be a

What sorts of features does btrfs offer home users that ZFS lacks? My experiences with btrfs have been somewhat mixed. On OpenSuse, I've found snapper to be an amazing lifesaver, but the regular system-crippling maintenance process[0] to be very frustrating. [0] https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/523354-High-CPU-load-related-to-btrfs-causes-lock-up https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/523354-High-CPU-l... - the thread implies that it is quota-related, but I've seen this happen on machines without quotas enabled.

ScottBurson 8y ago
The big missing feature, IMO, is that you can't grow a vdev just by adding a disk -- you have to go through this rigmarole of swapping in a larger disk and resilvering, one at a time.
- Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
  Yes, this is a huge pain point with ZFS. RAIDZ expansion is coming[0] though, so things are getting better. [0] https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/openzfs-raid-z-online-expansion-project-announcement/ https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/openzfs-raid-z-online...
cbolton 8y ago
It's been a while since I played with btrfs but it was really nice to be able to dynamically add hard drives of any size to a volume and have the filesystem seamlessly balance the data between the drives with the requested replication factor.
the8472 8y ago
Very flexible online resizing, re-striping and conversion between RAID levels of pools. On-demand deduplication instead of always-active. Reflink copy. On-demand compression and defragmentation. No ARC gobbling up memory (competes with page cache). NOCOW files.
- cmurf 8y ago
  - metadata raid1 with data raid5. If you currently have metadata raid5 'btrfs balance start -mconvert=raid1 <mp>' will online convert metadata from raid5 to raid1. - raid10 with a device failure, you might think you have to wait a day or two for a device replacement, but in fact you can do `btrfs device remove missing <mp>` and the data on the missing device is replicated into the free space of remaining devices along with an online shrink, and the whole operation is COW and atomic per block group.

ScottBurson 8y ago

The big missing feature, IMO, is that you can't grow a vdev just by adding a disk -- you have to go through this rigmarole of swapping in a larger disk and resilvering, one at a time.

Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
Yes, this is a huge pain point with ZFS. RAIDZ expansion is coming[0] though, so things are getting better. [0] https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/openzfs-raid-z-online-expansion-project-announcement/ https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/openzfs-raid-z-online...

cbolton 8y ago

It's been a while since I played with btrfs but it was really nice to be able to dynamically add hard drives of any size to a volume and have the filesystem seamlessly balance the data between the drives with the requested replication factor.

the8472 8y ago

Very flexible online resizing, re-striping and conversion between RAID levels of pools. On-demand deduplication instead of always-active. Reflink copy. On-demand compression and defragmentation. No ARC gobbling up memory (competes with page cache). NOCOW files.

cmurf 8y ago
- metadata raid1 with data raid5. If you currently have metadata raid5 'btrfs balance start -mconvert=raid1 <mp>' will online convert metadata from raid5 to raid1. - raid10 with a device failure, you might think you have to wait a day or two for a device replacement, but in fact you can do `btrfs device remove missing <mp>` and the data on the missing device is replicated into the free space of remaining devices along with an online shrink, and the whole operation is COW and atomic per block group.