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Simple filesystems - those oriented at speed, without integrity checking, compression, encryption and raid-like features. Which are extremely useful and desirab
by effie 3y ago
Simple filesystems - those oriented at speed, without integrity checking, compression, encryption and raid-like features. Which are extremely useful and desirable in a filesystem.
When people tried to do a full-featured filesystem, with a remarkable exception (ZFS) it's either a disappointing unfinished mess (btrfs) or a promising, but a long-term project taking years (bcachefs).
Making a filesystem with strong support of important features is an extremely demanding project.
- midoridensha 3y agoDon't forget: buggy filesystem code can easily lead to catastrophic data loss, which ruins your filesystem's reputation. Lines of code isn't the only important metric. A project with a smaller number of LoC can take a long time to fully test and debug and validate.
- Foobar8568 3y agoHammer2 comes to mind as well..
- effie 3y agoDoes it run on Linux or ordinary BSD? Does any company use it?
- spookie 3y agoI'm sorry, as I keep hearing these criticisms around BTRFS, I still don't know why. What is so messy about it? Honest question
- janneke 3y agoHave you tried reading the code? It's twice as large (107KLOC) as ext4 (45KLOC), where ext4 is viewed as a natural evolution of ext2 (7KLOC). 45KLOC of C code already sounds really scary to me, although yeah, journaling is really nice to have.
- spookie 3y agoYes, that's scary. Understandable, but it does come with a lot of functionality that's nice to have no?
- effie 3y agoIt's "perpetually half-finished". Convoluted admin cli tooling, bad track record with reliability and loss of data, lots of stories on the internet. It perhaps got better, but RAID5/RAID6 for metadata (standard use of disks) still not oficially recommended and thus standard RAID5/RAID6 is not reliable. Also, look at some FS benchmarks - BTRFS is still much slower than EXT/XFS, and slower than ZFS. About the only class of scenarios to use BTRFS instead of ZFS is if you want the features, do not need RAID5/6, require support by Linux distributor/kernel developers or for some other (hard to think of) reason you can't use ZFS. I do use BTRFS on a single disk where I don't touch it with cli tools, and there it's fine.
- JohnFen 3y agoFilesystems aren't complex to implement -- even complex filesystems. What's harder is making them as robust as they need to be for practical daily use. Doing that is a matter of comprehensive testing, though. With filesystems, the hard part is QA, not implementation.
- effie 3y agoOh it's word games with "implement". OK then, let's agree then developing a modern filesystem into a robust software for practical daily use is hard.