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Do Meta not develop btrfs for their internal use? I don't think community sentiment is a big factor for them.

Scaevolus 4y ago
Meta and related companies have much better systems available for durability than RAID5. I would be moderately surprised if they commonly use any standard RAID level.
- wtallis 4y ago
  Using traditional RAID (or moderate improvements on it, such as provided by btrfs and zfs) to provide drive-level redundancy seems like a waste of time when you also have to worry about redundancy between servers, racks, datacenters and regions. All of the arguments for why it's better to have something like zfs handle RAID rather than layering something on top of a traditional hardware RAID controller also work for explaining why you should prefer managing storage more globally rather than layering on top of something like zfs—if you have the resources to develop and maintain a true "full stack" storage solution. Which Facebook/Meta obviously does, when they can do things like publish their own spec documents that SSD vendors design around.
- AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  I imagine the "does not boot degraded" was mildly annoying to them, until they figured out the rootfsopts flag and deployed it. That whole thread above debating not booting degraded really made me lose any faith in btrfs.
_kdave 4y ago
AFAIK they use it internally, there are articles on lwn.net how, the use cases is for root filesystems and containers. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by the community sentiment, there are examples of code they'd developed internally first and sent it upstream, but in all cases I remember there were no problems. What can happen in the community is e.g. how the patches are organized or if the changelogs are complete. It's of course easier to develop something internally, if it touches other subsystems or if there's enough coverage just for the new code the test/fix/deploy cycle is much flexible. Once it's supposed to go through mailinlists or convincing other maintainers to accept changes it takes longer and must stick to the development cycle. This benefits both sides in the long run.
mekster 4y ago
Their culture of "works for me" attitude makes most stuff they care irrelevant to the rest of the world.

Meta and related companies have much better systems available for durability than RAID5. I would be moderately surprised if they commonly use any standard RAID level.

wtallis 4y ago
Using traditional RAID (or moderate improvements on it, such as provided by btrfs and zfs) to provide drive-level redundancy seems like a waste of time when you also have to worry about redundancy between servers, racks, datacenters and regions. All of the arguments for why it's better to have something like zfs handle RAID rather than layering something on top of a traditional hardware RAID controller also work for explaining why you should prefer managing storage more globally rather than layering on top of something like zfs—if you have the resources to develop and maintain a true "full stack" storage solution. Which Facebook/Meta obviously does, when they can do things like publish their own spec documents that SSD vendors design around.
AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
I imagine the "does not boot degraded" was mildly annoying to them, until they figured out the rootfsopts flag and deployed it. That whole thread above debating not booting degraded really made me lose any faith in btrfs.

_kdave 4y ago

AFAIK they use it internally, there are articles on lwn.net how, the use cases is for root filesystems and containers. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by the community sentiment, there are examples of code they'd developed internally first and sent it upstream, but in all cases I remember there were no problems. What can happen in the community is e.g. how the patches are organized or if the changelogs are complete. It's of course easier to develop something internally, if it touches other subsystems or if there's enough coverage just for the new code the test/fix/deploy cycle is much flexible. Once it's supposed to go through mailinlists or convincing other maintainers to accept changes it takes longer and must stick to the development cycle. This benefits both sides in the long run.

mekster 4y ago

Their culture of "works for me" attitude makes most stuff they care irrelevant to the rest of the world.