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⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

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Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#111
post #55
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be confusing with SuSE? Generally though sadly btrfs just isn't getting the man hours from any commercial sponsor it seems :(

Facebook, Fujitsu and SUSE are all actively contributing to btrfs. The idea it isn't getting "the man hours from any commercial sponsor" is ludicrous.

And this is what makes me worried about the design of btrfs. If after all these man hours Redhat thinks it still is not stable enough I worry if it ever will be.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#112
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bugs? I recently setup a software mirroring raid with btrfs and I'm loving features like checksumming. It makes me feel my data is quite safe and can't bit rot anymore. So far it is working fine.

Hi. Did you notice that the official description of RAID-1 is "Mostly working"? Are you aware if one of your drive fails, you have one chance to re-mirror it, before the remaining drive can no longer be mounted read-write and you need to dump the filesystem and re-create from scratch?

That's just how raid mirroring works. Now sure why you mention it specifically for btrfs?

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#113
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

I find the suggestion that the technical issues are caused by the CoW design a bit strange. Sure, making the filesystem CoW-based means there are some inherent costs, but it allows the filesystem to implement some interesting features (e.g. snapshots) in a more efficient way. For example if you want to do snapshots with ext4/xfs, you'll probably do that using LVM (which you can see as turning the stack into a CoW). I…

Didn't one of your benchmarks show that nodatacow on Btrfs resulted in a major performance improvement? But that might just show an issue with Btrfs's CoW implementation rather than CoW in general.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#114
post #52
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…

Worse, I browse without javascript and their page has no text. It's utterly terribly designed to be an open source information page.

The text is there, just invisible. Disable CSS and it'll show up.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#115
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bugs? I recently setup a software mirroring raid with btrfs and I'm loving features like checksumming. It makes me feel my data is quite safe and can't bit rot anymore. So far it is working fine.

Hi. Did you notice that the official description of RAID-1 is "Mostly working"? Are you aware if one of your drive fails, you have one chance to re-mirror it, before the remaining drive can no longer be mounted read-write and you need to dump the filesystem and re-create from scratch?

Tbh I don't care if I can't mount it read-write as long as I can mount RO and get the data to a new filesystem. The drives are new so nothing to worry about for years (probably). And if I get a chance ("one chance") to re-mirror, even better.

It might be an inconvenient restriction, but when a drive fails I'm already happy that there will be no data loss.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#116
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

RPM-based distros make up maybe 10 % of the Linux installations these days, so we should not overstate RedHat's influence.

RHEL makes up maybe 99.9% of the Linux enterprise installations these days, so we can't overstate RedHat's influence.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#117
post #94

Well I used btrfs as a root filesystem for quite a while, until I realized it was pig slow for sync() -- I mean, it would take AGES to do and apt-get upgrade for example. I ended up having to do some tasks using 'eatmydata' [0] to make it all better, risking filesystem corruption in trade for speed. Also, at the time, there was no functioning fsck. So I moved back safely to ext4 and never looked back! [0]: https://ww…

Over the recent years on every new laptop install i switched between filesystems, so i had ext3/4, btrfs and (currently) xfs on my system. I have to say, btrfs had the most glitches (a few years back), although it worked ok'ish (no data loss). Nowadays, i must say that i very much prefer a stable filesystem with as little complicated logic as possible. I actually never use snapshots or subtrees! I never put another d…

It's ok to play with the OS in order to learn.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#118
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the recent years on every new laptop install i switched between filesystems, so i had ext3/4, btrfs and (currently) xfs on my system. I have to say, btrfs had the most glitches (a few years back), although it worked ok'ish (no data loss). Nowadays, i must say that i very much prefer a stable filesystem with as little complicated logic as possible. I actually never use snapshots or subtrees! I never put another d…

> Will you really need and use subtrees/snapshots/XYZ on your system? It's a valid question, but not the best one. Almost nobody needs snapshots. But they make things easier. You most likely don't need a journaled fs in your laptop either (battery level notification should take care of the issues). But it does make life better. "Need" is not the threshold I'm interested in. Most features, I'd like. One feature I thin…

"Need" as in "will you use it?". I played around with snapshots once and never really used them. So i clearly don't have a need for them on my laptop. Journaling on the other hand helps data safety a lot and i think it's not overly complex. I've had data loss happing in the past before journaling, but never again since then. So, wouldn't i need CoW for even better "data safety"? Maybe, but since i've never experienced data loss for so many years, i don't feel like the added complexity is worth it. On my laptop, for my usecase.

But that's only me. Your experience may differ very much :)

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#119

It's OT but how many people actually use RHEL? Or CentOS (more likely). I'm not a fan of systemd, but have really loathed CentOS/RHEL compared to Debian/* for years.

As a general rule if the end customer was finance/bank their Linux flavor was RedHat (someone to yell at when it broke). Other tech companies / web types it was Ubuntu. This was my experience in over 4 startups where these were are end customers. Your mileage may vary.

In my experience Debian seems to be more common in Europe. Here there is a mix of RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu and some CentOS. With banks and finance preferring RHEL.
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