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There is no reason to ever use btrfs, IMO. btrfs is the result of Oracle trying to clone, badly, ZFS. When they bought Sun, they discontinued development on bt

There is no reason to ever use btrfs, IMO. btrfs is the result of Oracle trying to clone, badly, ZFS. When they bought Sun, they discontinued development on btrfs completely, as they (thought they) owned ZFS. Nobody sponsors btrfs development anymore, and its development has completely stagnated; while ZFS, under the OpenZFS project, continues to accelerate and absolutely dominates the enterprise mission critical file system sort of market. Just use the real deal: use ZFS. Due to the massive data loss issues with btrfs, for example, Redhat completely removed btrfs support in 8 entirely, after the preview feature in 7 bombed. They default to, and highly recommend, XFS (as do I, its a good file system).

candiddevmike 3y ago
Anecdotally, I've had so much trouble running Linux on a ZFS root. Failing DKMS builds or installing a kernel that is too new or old for the ZFS components has rendered my system unbootable enough that I switched to BTRFS.
- DiabloD3 3y ago
  The only time I've heard this happening is on Ubuntu. Don't use Ubuntu, and switch to Debian or SUSE, and your problems go away. The only times I've ever heard of this not being Ubuntu pathology is people running builds of the kernel from git, and not keeping track of the extremely rare breaking changes that effect ZFS (OpenZFS's git repo for the kernel modules are updated quickly, and breaking changes are often handled ahead of time; all of this is fixed before stable kernels get released nowadays).
akvadrako 3y ago
A good reason to use Btrfs over ZFS is if, like me, you use Fedora Silverblue. It's supported by default while ZFS is essentially impossible to use – I use VMs for the occasional need. Another good reason is simplified tooling – ZFS has a lot of special ways of doing things different from all other filesystems. RedHat seemed to remove Btrfs because that want to move towards Stratis, not because ZFS or XFS is good enough. None of them are perfect yet and my best hope for the future is bcachefs.
callahad 3y ago
> Nobody sponsors btrfs development anymore Doesn't SUSE still use btrfs as their default rootfs? Looking at `git shortlog -sne --since="1 Jan, 2023" fs/btrfs/` it seems like folks at least at Suse, Oracle, and Western Digital have all made more than a dozen commits this year.
- yrro 3y ago
  As does Fedora Workstation (as of a couple of releases ago) Being able to sit back and have a big bunch o'disks that I can just add and remove devices to is convenient when combined with BTFS raid1: data will be present on at least two disks, I don't care which. I don't think ZFS is able to do this. It's obviously more suited for serious enterprise use where you have plans and budgets... ;) (Once I too have my data eaten by it I'll no doubt be very grumpy, then again that's what backups are for so...) More seriously, I'd give ZFS a go but it's still too much of a pain in the arse to use with Linux. If even Oracle Unbreakable Linux can't integrate it properly then what hope does anyone else have? (Talking about making me build my own kernel modules here)
  - DiabloD3 3y ago
    Building kernel modules doesn't have to be scary. Debian and SUSE both do this perfectly and automatically.
    - yrro 3y ago
      It's not scary. It's just annoying and I don't want to do it any more.
AnonC 3y ago
> There is no reason to ever use btrfs, IMO. > ... > Due to the massive data loss issues with btrfs, for example, Redhat completely removed btrfs support in 8 entirely, after the preview feature in 7 bombed. They default to, and highly recommend, XFS (as do I, its a good file system). Synology strongly recommends btrfs in its NAS systems and promotes that over ext4, which is also supported by Synology. [1] On the consumer side, I guess this would probably be larger than ZFS/XFS usage. [1]: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/Btrfs https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/Btrfs
- DiabloD3 3y ago
  I wouldn't wish a Synology box on anyone. If you need a well supported NAS that anyone can operate, just slap TrueNAS onto a budget NAS box and be done with it. TrueNAS uses ZFS, and actively discourages btrfs due to a history of data loss issues.

candiddevmike 3y ago

Anecdotally, I've had so much trouble running Linux on a ZFS root. Failing DKMS builds or installing a kernel that is too new or old for the ZFS components has rendered my system unbootable enough that I switched to BTRFS.

DiabloD3 3y ago
The only time I've heard this happening is on Ubuntu. Don't use Ubuntu, and switch to Debian or SUSE, and your problems go away. The only times I've ever heard of this not being Ubuntu pathology is people running builds of the kernel from git, and not keeping track of the extremely rare breaking changes that effect ZFS (OpenZFS's git repo for the kernel modules are updated quickly, and breaking changes are often handled ahead of time; all of this is fixed before stable kernels get released nowadays).

akvadrako 3y ago

A good reason to use Btrfs over ZFS is if, like me, you use Fedora Silverblue. It's supported by default while ZFS is essentially impossible to use – I use VMs for the occasional need. Another good reason is simplified tooling – ZFS has a lot of special ways of doing things different from all other filesystems. RedHat seemed to remove Btrfs because that want to move towards Stratis, not because ZFS or XFS is good enough. None of them are perfect yet and my best hope for the future is bcachefs.

callahad 3y ago

> Nobody sponsors btrfs development anymore Doesn't SUSE still use btrfs as their default rootfs? Looking at `git shortlog -sne --since="1 Jan, 2023" fs/btrfs/` it seems like folks at least at Suse, Oracle, and Western Digital have all made more than a dozen commits this year.

yrro 3y ago
As does Fedora Workstation (as of a couple of releases ago) Being able to sit back and have a big bunch o'disks that I can just add and remove devices to is convenient when combined with BTFS raid1: data will be present on at least two disks, I don't care which. I don't think ZFS is able to do this. It's obviously more suited for serious enterprise use where you have plans and budgets... ;) (Once I too have my data eaten by it I'll no doubt be very grumpy, then again that's what backups are for so...) More seriously, I'd give ZFS a go but it's still too much of a pain in the arse to use with Linux. If even Oracle Unbreakable Linux can't integrate it properly then what hope does anyone else have? (Talking about making me build my own kernel modules here)
- DiabloD3 3y ago
  Building kernel modules doesn't have to be scary. Debian and SUSE both do this perfectly and automatically.
  - yrro 3y ago
    It's not scary. It's just annoying and I don't want to do it any more.

AnonC 3y ago

> There is no reason to ever use btrfs, IMO. > ... > Due to the massive data loss issues with btrfs, for example, Redhat completely removed btrfs support in 8 entirely, after the preview feature in 7 bombed. They default to, and highly recommend, XFS (as do I, its a good file system). Synology strongly recommends btrfs in its NAS systems and promotes that over ext4, which is also supported by Synology. [1] On the consumer side, I guess this would probably be larger than ZFS/XFS usage. [1]: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/Btrfs https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/Btrfs

DiabloD3 3y ago
I wouldn't wish a Synology box on anyone. If you need a well supported NAS that anyone can operate, just slap TrueNAS onto a budget NAS box and be done with it. TrueNAS uses ZFS, and actively discourages btrfs due to a history of data loss issues.