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Strangely, rather old ZFS keeps popping up in the news, while I never hear of Btrfs these days. It had some hype five or so years ago―what became of it?

by aasasd 7y ago

jdhawk 7y ago
Synology, which is linux based, is really high on btrfs, otherwise I have not seen a lot of use cases.
- u02sgb 7y ago
  Doesn't use many of the advanced features though e.g. RAID is done using standard Linux mdraid with a btrfs partition on top of it.
  - pnutjam 7y ago
    btrfs pools can use different sized disks, which can be useful.
- skykooler 7y ago
  Jolla uses btrfs for the Sailfish OS mobile phone OS, which I'll admit is a rather baffling decision.
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    Used. Only the orignal Jolla phone introduced at the end of 2013 used btrfs. There have been many many problems with btrfs on the device, mainly due to metadata vs data block allocation issues & resulting metadata space exhaustion. The balance ooeration being basically unbounded in time and fregvently crashing outright did not help. Since then all other devices made or officially supported by Jolla are using EXT4 on LVM, including this one Xperia X running Sailfish OS I'm typing this on.
    - skykooler 7y ago
      Huh, I could have sword the Xperia X port also used BTRFS, but I guess I never checked. (And yeah, those issues were how I found out: unable to create files while having "4 gb of free space" - not helped by the fact that it didn't run the balancer automatically.)
nickik 7y ago
Btrfs is still out there and in use. But most people think ZFS is better and there is still more use and development of ZFS compared to Btrfs. Btrfs has a bad reputation because to many people lost data, including me. I would never again use Btrfs, only ZFS.
- pnutjam 7y ago
  Btrfs is the default filesystem for OpenSuse. I use it all the time and it's very stable. https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status Give it a try, it's part of the kernel and it works really well.
  - nickik 7y ago
    That's fine. However file system that I can even configure or use in a way that eats my data, I will simply not consider using. And I will not consider using OpenSuse because of that. When it was eating my data it was also supposed to be stable. But turns out it wasn't.
    - pnutjam 7y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHalOdCZO9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHalOdCZO9Q
      - nickik 7y ago
        Yeah I tried restoring, non of the common tools or tricks I found online at that time helped me. If this particlar video would have made the difference then that's still a shitty situation. If you want to use btrfs go ahead, I will not do so again.
akvadrako 7y ago
Btrfs is still very slow compared to all other file major systems.

Strangely, rather old ZFS keeps popping up in the news, while I never hear of Btrfs these days. It had some hype five or so years ago―what became of it?

by aasasd 7y ago

Strangely, rather old ZFS keeps popping up in the news, while I never hear of Btrfs these days. It had some hype five or so years ago―what became of it?

jdhawk 7y ago

Synology, which is linux based, is really high on btrfs, otherwise I have not seen a lot of use cases.

u02sgb 7y ago
Doesn't use many of the advanced features though e.g. RAID is done using standard Linux mdraid with a btrfs partition on top of it.
- pnutjam 7y ago
  btrfs pools can use different sized disks, which can be useful.
skykooler 7y ago
Jolla uses btrfs for the Sailfish OS mobile phone OS, which I'll admit is a rather baffling decision.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  Used. Only the orignal Jolla phone introduced at the end of 2013 used btrfs. There have been many many problems with btrfs on the device, mainly due to metadata vs data block allocation issues & resulting metadata space exhaustion. The balance ooeration being basically unbounded in time and fregvently crashing outright did not help. Since then all other devices made or officially supported by Jolla are using EXT4 on LVM, including this one Xperia X running Sailfish OS I'm typing this on.
  - skykooler 7y ago
    Huh, I could have sword the Xperia X port also used BTRFS, but I guess I never checked. (And yeah, those issues were how I found out: unable to create files while having "4 gb of free space" - not helped by the fact that it didn't run the balancer automatically.)

nickik 7y ago

Btrfs is still out there and in use. But most people think ZFS is better and there is still more use and development of ZFS compared to Btrfs. Btrfs has a bad reputation because to many people lost data, including me. I would never again use Btrfs, only ZFS.

pnutjam 7y ago
Btrfs is the default filesystem for OpenSuse. I use it all the time and it's very stable. https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status Give it a try, it's part of the kernel and it works really well.
- nickik 7y ago
  That's fine. However file system that I can even configure or use in a way that eats my data, I will simply not consider using. And I will not consider using OpenSuse because of that. When it was eating my data it was also supposed to be stable. But turns out it wasn't.
  - pnutjam 7y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHalOdCZO9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHalOdCZO9Q
    - nickik 7y ago
      Yeah I tried restoring, non of the common tools or tricks I found online at that time helped me. If this particlar video would have made the difference then that's still a shitty situation. If you want to use btrfs go ahead, I will not do so again.

akvadrako 7y ago

Btrfs is still very slow compared to all other file major systems.