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⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

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Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#161

Post by lathiat »

icebraining wrote: post #67
lathiat wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy to see his Patreon is looking "healthier". I mean $1500/m isn't really that much but I'm sure last I looked it was much lower. In other news.. consider supporting the people that support you! Personally, I spent over $100/month on Patreon. Most of those are creators rather than open source people but there are a couple of open source ones such as Ondřej Surý who works on PHP packaging in Debian/Ubuntu

Joey Hess, a formerly prominent Debian developer and author of git-annex, etckeeper and a bunch of other open source projects is also on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/joeyh Unfortunately, he's only getting $500/m, which isn't much even for someone with a very "off-grid" life: https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/notes_for_a_caretaker/

Thanks for the link! I've added him to my patreon-roll (what do you call that?)

Discoverability is a real problem for Patreon, outside of the "most successful"

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#162

Post by boomboomsubban »

e12e wrote: post #150
bestham wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But presumably, as copyright holders, Oracle is the entity that could try to enforce CDDL in court, in particular breaking the CDDL by mixing in GPL code in the same (ie: OS) distribution? Oracle goes: we bought Sun, and hold copyright to ZFS (also at the point of the OpenZFS fork) - RedHat could respond: we got a license - the CDDL - and Oracle could respond, sure - but CDDL isn't compatible with GPL - so you're in…

>But presumably, as copyright holders, Oracle is the entity that could try to enforce CDDL in court, in particular breaking the CDDL by mixing in GPL code in the same (ie: OS) distribution?

Any Linux contributor could also try to enforce it, which is why the license incompatibility is the issue stopping them. Oracle holds no special power.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#163

Post by jeltz »

cyphar wrote: post #128
jeltz wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why are you shifting the goal posts? Also, Red Hat has not been a significant contributor to btrfs for a while (they've mostly been working on XFS and lvm/devicemapper) so them dropping it is hardly a surprise -- Red Hat is not the arbiter of what is a good technology, and there are many other parties that work on Linux.

Are you confusing me with someone else? Because I have never claimed that Redhat has been a major contributor behind Btrfs nor have I claimed that Btrfs development is lacking in contributors.

And to me this is just another voice which is septical of the current state of Btrfs. And while Redhat is not the only voice, it is an important voice.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#164

Post by [deleted] »

cyphar wrote: post #128
jeltz wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why are you shifting the goal posts? Also, Red Hat has not been a significant contributor to btrfs for a while (they've mostly been working on XFS and lvm/devicemapper) so them dropping it is hardly a surprise -- Red Hat is not the arbiter of what is a good technology, and there are many other parties that work on Linux.

[deleted]

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#165

Post by RX14 »

I've done many bad things to BTRFS, used it on multiple drives of differing sises, used it on drives connected over the cheapest USB to SATA adapters I could find, used it on disks with consistent corruption for over a year, and it's handled it gracefully.

I've also been using btrfs as the backend to docker for a long time on my desktop PC and never noticed any problems. BTRFS has been rock solid for me. I don't doubt it is more unstable than other filesystems, however it seems i haven't been unlucky enough to experience any issues.

When using BTRFS, i've always stuck to the latest kernel releases, and run a scrub + balance every month. This is the advice I heard from people who used btrfs, and I wonder how many of the people who complain about data corruption do these steps. Perhaps their corruption bugs are solved in a newer kernel version. I've had multiple scrubs pick up data corruption, which other filesystems wouldn't have found.

The only time btrfs corrupted my data was when I used the ext4 to btrfs conversion tool, it created an unmountable FS and then I just migrated my data manually.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#166

Post by rrdharan »

tjoff wrote: post #130
osandov wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What problems have you had with Btrfs recently?

That, exact, question is the question you get, and has got for years and years, when questioning btrfs maturity. It seems as if btrfs always "just yesterday" got mature just when that last thing was fixed. Sorry, but I don't believe enough in btrfs to try it out for real (and don't have time to play with it just for fun). Especially when playing with more advanced features, the status page does not inspire confidence…

I found the patron site annoyingly hard to read on this device, so here's that paragraph, in case anyone is wondering:

btrfs, which was supposed to be Linux's next generation COW filesystem - Linux's answer to zfs. Unfortunately, too much code was written too quickly without focusing on getting the core design correct first, and now it has too many design mistakes baked into the on disk format and an enormous, messy codebase - bigger that xfs. It's taken far too long to stabilize as well - poisoning the well for future filesystems because too many people were burned on btrfs, repeatedly (e.g. Fedora's tried to switch to btrfs multiple times and had to switch at the last minute, and server vendors who years ago hoped to one day roll out btrfs are now quietly migrating to xfs instead).

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#167

Post by cyphar »

jeltz wrote: post #163
cyphar wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you shifting the goal posts? Also, Red Hat has not been a significant contributor to btrfs for a while (they've mostly been working on XFS and lvm/devicemapper) so them dropping it is hardly a surprise -- Red Hat is not the arbiter of what is a good technology, and there are many other parties that work on Linux.

Are you confusing me with someone else? Because I have never claimed that Redhat has been a major contributor behind Btrfs nor have I claimed that Btrfs development is lacking in contributors. And to me this is just another voice which is septical of the current state of Btrfs. And while Redhat is not the only voice, it is an important voice.

Sorry, I was responding to a comment that said that btrfs didn't have any "man hours" behind it and your response was basically "and even with those man hours Red Hat still decided against it". It didn't feel like a reasonable response in that context.

Red Hat is an important voice, but please remember that supporting something as part of an enterprise distribution requires that you have engineers that work upstream constantly on said project. You can't just passively support something.

A while ago, most of Red Hat's btrfs developers moved to Facebook and clearly they decided that it wasn't worth the money to hire more people to support btrfs on RHEL. If they didn't see customer demand for it, why should they burden their kernel team with supporting something that nobody is asking them for? SUSE supports btrfs (and not just as a technical preview) and they can switch to SLE if they really want btrfs.

Just because something isn't shipping in RHEL doesn't mean that Red Hat decided that btrfs was bad. They likely decided that either their customers are better suited with other options, or they don't think the cost of getting more engineering talent would be worth it. Btrfs is still shipping in Fedora.

[I work for SUSE.]

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#168

Post by mseidl »

alexdowad wrote: post #92

I tried btrfs and got bitten by bugs; not doing that again. Judging from this move by RH, it looks like I wasn't the only one.

I had tried xfs recently and I hated it. I have a thin laptop which would just lose power if I grabbed it wrong and very quickly my xfs partition got corrupted and I was unable to fix it. So, I had to re-install my os, and went back to ext4. Which even with the same power offs, never an issue since several months. This is largely anecdotal. But have had a coworker with the same issue too...

I also had issues with a vms using xfs too.

But, I do use xfs on ssd raids(in our servers, being used for testing) and never had an issue there.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#169

Post by 4ad »

lathiat wrote: post #154
bestham wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct, Oracle would be in a position to do exactly that. Whether they do or not is another story but thats a pretty big liability. Given they are discontinuing Solaris and all-in on Red Hat Enterprise Linux I can't help but wonder why they don't do more with ZFS on Linux and therefor wonder if the NetApp patent suits or some other patent suit is preventing them from doing anything in the background. Many people don…

> Given they are discontinuing Solaris

Oracle is NOT discontinuing Solaris. This FUD must die.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14865237

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#170

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

joosters wrote: post #160
dsr_ wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

apt doesn't assume that you have a reliable filesystem. It assumes that you might crash at any moment, and it would be really important for you to have a consistent view of what packages are installed when you reboot.

But ext3 and more advanced filesystems have been around for almost twenty years now... it seems an odd assumption that your filesystem is unreliable on any machine that isn't completely ancient (is anyone still using ext2, for instance?)

Debian calls itself "the universal operating system" and officially supports not only multiple init systems, but multiple kernels (kfreebsd); somehow I don't see it relying on specific filesystems.
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