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⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

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Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#131

Post by cyphar »

lomnakkus wrote: post #123
buster wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 experience…

> "Need" as in "will you use it?". Well, many of us have experienced a botched system package upgrade or two. If the file system supports snapshots, then the package manager could automatically ensure fully atomic package upgrades. That should be reason enough, I should think. Re: The data loss issue: Yes, I've actually have XFS completely throw away a file system upon a hard power-off + boot-up cycle. (This was ages…

> If the file system supports snapshots, then the package manager could automatically ensure fully atomic package upgrades.

That's exactly what openSUSE / SLE do with snapper. Every upgrade or package install with YaST/zypper creates two snapshots (before/after) and you can easily rollback to an older snapshot (even doing so from GRUB). This has been enabled by default for years.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#132

Post by cyphar »

ge0rg wrote: post #75
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 p…

The particular bug that sparked that warning was fixed a while ago, but as a precaution against "btrfs ate my data" stories they've removed the ability to create btrfs-raid from the CLI tools (you can still use md RAID with btrfs but you lose most of the benefits of btrfs that way).

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#133

Post by Maakuth »

buster wrote: post #94
buserror wrote: post #70

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 a good practice to use LVM there between disk partitions and volumes. It has negligible performance implications but makes things very flexible when you need to resize volumes or add space. You also gain reliable snapshotting from device mapper, although that does have some performance effects.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#134

Post by cyphar »

rantanplan wrote: post #116
smarnach wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that number is even close to accurate. SLE almost certainly makes up more than 15% of the market alone. And that's ignoring all of the other enterprise distributions.

I believe that 2015 estimates from the IDC[1] had RHEL at ~60%, SLE at ~20%, Oracle Linux at ~12% and "Other" at ~8%. But I can't access the document at the moment.

[1]: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US41360517

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#135

Post by [deleted] »

buserror wrote: post #70

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…

[deleted]

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#136

Post by pmlnr »

Great... So can I please have something that can do transparent compression? That is my sole reason for using btrfs. (My personal stack is on ZFS with Debian and I'm never going to look back from that, even if I sometimes have speed issues due to SATA instead of SAS system underneath it; ZFS compression and snapshots are incredibly powerful.)

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#137

Post by rwmj »

vacri wrote: post #40
tbrock wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XFS is the default FS on RHEL now, so likely that.

Do you know if XFS can shrink volumes yet? As far as I'm aware, that's the only limitation it has compared to other filesystems of that era.

It can't, but you're probably better off using trim/discard/virt-sparsify rather than shrinking filesystems. Even on filesystems like ext4 that support it, shrinking can cause strange fs performance problems.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#138

Post by pmlnr »

buster wrote: post #94
buserror wrote: post #70

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…

My requirements: transparent compression. I'm left with: btrfs or, if possible, ZFS.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#139

Post by bestham »

jdub wrote: post #110
boomboomsubban wrote: post #87

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 The only connection Oracle has to ZFS on Linux is ownership of some patents that the license allows you to use, their reluctance is based on distribution issues between the GPL and CDDL.

… for which Oracle owns the copyright.

I can't see that the copyright matter here. What matters is the license. Oracle can't unlicence what Sun code is already part of OpenZFS.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#140

Post by madez »

rodgerd wrote: post #101
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 You literally have no idea what you're talking about, and I doubt you've used btrfs seriously, or you wouldn't talk this shit. The fact it's been upvoted so heavily just shows what absolute technically-false nonsense will draw support at HN.

There was no reason given for the deprecation of BTRFS.
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