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⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

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Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#71

Post by gcp »

beedogs wrote: post #60
kureikain wrote: post #53

I have used Btrfs in production and I would say it's great. It's super easy to just add an extra EBS volume and attach to a Btrfs volume and now you have more disk space. Performance is good enough for me as well, I used it as storage for InfluxDB and Docker. Luckily this is only Redhat, not Btrfs itself.

Unfortunately, RedHat tends to be the trendsetter in the Linux world. Once it's gone from RHEL, it'll be gone from most other RPM based distros soon enough. It's kind of a shame that one company has grown to dominate the Linux software ecosystem, often to the detriment of all involved.

Red Hat has a lot of core Linux contributors on their payroll. Their status is, AFAIK, not undeserved.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#73

Post by gcp »

cmurf wrote: post #66

Unsurprising. Red Hat has not hired upstream Btrfs developers for years, where SUSE has hired bunches. Meanwhile Red Hat has upstream ext4, XFS and LVM developers. If you're going to support a code base for ~10 years, you're going to need upstream people to support it. And realistically Red Hat's comfortable putting their eggs all in the device-mapper, LVM, and XFS basket. But, there's more: https://github.com/strati…

As for the significant technical issues, one thing is the core decision to make it a CoW system, which has fundamental performance issues with many workloads that are exactly those used in the server space. You can disable CoW, but you lose many reasons to use btrfs in the first place if you do.

When I gave up on it there were also fundamental issues with metadata vs data balancing, not-really-working RAID support, and so on...

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#74

Post by tjoff »

cyphar wrote: post #56
louwrentius wrote: post #19

Sounds to me that Btrfs is done for long-term. So now what?

Facebook, Fujitsu and SUSE all contribute to btrfs and it is still being actively developed (it's the default filesystem for SUSE Linux Enterprise). Red Hat stopped contributing a while ago since most of their btrfs developers moved to Facebook. "Done for the long-term" is a major overstatement IMO.

Well, for those of us that have been waiting on btrfs for a frigging decade I get the feeling that it is never going to be ready.

If I wait another decade, will btrfs have matured? Will there be ANY half-modern filesystem for linux? I'm not convinced.

Currently bcachefs seems more appealing but well, long way to go there as well.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#75

Post by ge0rg »

bedros wrote: post #38

I think this is a political move disguised as technical move oracle pays the developers of btrfs [0] redhat hates the guts of oracle, since oracle released oracle linux, which is a clone of redhat enterprise (based on centos) so, redhat wants to cripple btrfs and hurt oracle. However, btrfs is my favorite FS, been using it on my home computer and backup drives for at least 6 years, before it was included in the kerne…

I think this is a political move disguised as technical move

I think there are solid technical reasons to discourage Btrfs use, just to quote from the official wiki [0]:

> The parity RAID code has multiple serious data-loss bugs in it. It should not be used for anything other than testing purposes.

Now I don't know if this issue has been addressed already, or which kernels are affected, but the fact that there is a prominent warning on the wiki speaks for itself.

Personally, I'm a happy btrfs user deploying a mixed-disk-size array without parity, with the hope to add redundancy some time in the future. Currently, btrfs is the only FS allowing to mix disks of any size and to run an optimal configuration on top of them [1].

[0] https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID56

[1] http://carfax.org.uk/btrfs-usage/

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#77

Post by pmontra »

icebraining wrote: post #64
pmontra wrote: post #45

Offtopic, but if anybody from RedHat and especially Mozilla read this, go to that page with an Android phone, possibly with a small screen: To RedHat: do something for that menu at the left. It stays in the way when scrolling and zooming. The X to close it is not immediately visible on a small screen. Expected behavior: the menu scrolls away with the page and doesn't stay fixed in the way of the reader. To Mozilla: o…

Re: Mozilla, they are aware, and there are a couple of about:config flags to enable text reflow on page load and on tap-to-zoom, but they're disabled by default "due to a number of reasons (mainly performance)".

I looked for them but maybe they don't have obvious names. I found that I set browser.ui.zoom.force-user-scalable to true, it defaults to false.

Do you remember their names? Thanks.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#78

Post by 2ion »

cyphar wrote: post #58
mrweasel wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redhat hasn't been on the best of terms with Oracle, so I suspect that they want to stay clear of ZFS. It does however leave Redhat without a more modern feature rich filesystem. Perhaps Redhat could help to develop snapshots on XFS. It's not the only feature XFS is missing, but it's a start.

> Perhaps Redhat could help to develop snapshots on XFS. It's not the only feature XFS is missing, but it's a start. Upstream has been working on adding more btrfs-like features to XFS, but I believe that RHEL encourages using devicemapper snapshots (which you then format with XFS).

> Upstream has been working on adding more btrfs-like features to XFS, but I believe that RHEL encourages using devicemapper snapshots (which you then format with XFS).

Exactly, mountable and mergable snapshots have been supported by a LVM/devicemapper stack for a long time.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#80

Post by jhasse »

pmontra wrote: post #45

Offtopic, but if anybody from RedHat and especially Mozilla read this, go to that page with an Android phone, possibly with a small screen: To RedHat: do something for that menu at the left. It stays in the way when scrolling and zooming. The X to close it is not immediately visible on a small screen. Expected behavior: the menu scrolls away with the page and doesn't stay fixed in the way of the reader. To Mozilla: o…

> Maybe Chrome does the same.

Nope

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