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Any blog post that espouses the virtues of btrfs as better alternative to ZFS is going to be immediately recognized as uninformed and a little embarrassing by a

Any blog post that espouses the virtues of btrfs as better alternative to ZFS is going to be immediately recognized as uninformed and a little embarrassing by any operator with a significant degree of experience in both technologies. As someone who _has_ operated many systems with both filesystems - for a long time - it’s malfeasance to shepherd someone in that direction. btrfs has its uses, but there’s no comparison in terms of project maturity. Sharp edges abound (behavior at high usage, RAID immaturity, the still-extant 5.16 kernel single-core max CPU use bug, etc.)

ungamed 5y ago
and ZFS has that nasty issue with 32 bit fragmented memory..
- p_l 5y ago
  Well, it's less ZFS and more Linux, but it makes for reasonable problem on 32bit platforms (though there was a lot of work to move of vmalloc() in ZoL)
akvadrako 5y ago
As evidence of these bugs in BTRFS. The kernel hotfix from a few days ago to break an infinite loop regression: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.16-Better-Btrfs https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.... And the announcement last year of officially giving up on RAID5/6 support, after not discouraging the totally dangerous feature for years: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Btrfs-Warning-RAID5-RAID6 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Btrfs-Wa... I would love to have options besides ZFS for check-summing and snapshots, but BTRFS isn't for people who care about their data.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ThatPlayer 5y ago
Similarly to the author, I definitely want to be able to use btrfs. I liked features like being able to add/remove drives, and reflink=auto. But I got burned on it's stability (luckily didn't lose any data) and would not look at it again for anything important in a long time. Still use it on single drive filesystems for inline compression sometimes though.

ungamed 5y ago

and ZFS has that nasty issue with 32 bit fragmented memory..

p_l 5y ago
Well, it's less ZFS and more Linux, but it makes for reasonable problem on 32bit platforms (though there was a lot of work to move of vmalloc() in ZoL)

akvadrako 5y ago

As evidence of these bugs in BTRFS. The kernel hotfix from a few days ago to break an infinite loop regression: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.16-Better-Btrfs https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.... And the announcement last year of officially giving up on RAID5/6 support, after not discouraging the totally dangerous feature for years: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Btrfs-Warning-RAID5-RAID6 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Btrfs-Wa... I would love to have options besides ZFS for check-summing and snapshots, but BTRFS isn't for people who care about their data.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ThatPlayer 5y ago

Similarly to the author, I definitely want to be able to use btrfs. I liked features like being able to add/remove drives, and reflink=auto. But I got burned on it's stability (luckily didn't lose any data) and would not look at it again for anything important in a long time. Still use it on single drive filesystems for inline compression sometimes though.