Brtfs only exists as Oracle's "replacement" for ZFS, to hedge their bets in case they couldn't buy Sun. Oracle bought sun in 2010, that has been 12 years. They merged the Btrfs and ZFS teams, they then worked on ZFS entirely with no Btrfs work, and then basically reassigned, fired, or otherwise dissolved the ZFS team when it became clear that OpenZFS (Sun's chosen steward for ZFS) could not be swayed. Btrfs has had n…
This is one of the most laughably ignorant posts I've ever seen on the internet. > Btrfs has had no real work done on it since then, and anyone that is actually serious about data storage has moved to ZFS, or has left POSIX filesystems entirely Btrfs is the most actively developed filesystem in the kernel, both by LOC changed and the number of contributors. Facebook publicly stated that they run BTRFS on every webser…
Examining Btrfs
41–50 of 112 posts
Re: Examining Btrfs
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But then again, when you're starting with zero ZFS knowledge, you also need to learn the particular way it's designed. Except… there's nothing to really learn. All these weird edge cases that can kill your BTRFS simply don't exist in ZFS. The tooling is also much more polished and in the few cases that something does require user attention, it'll tell you in easily understandable terms, so as a new user the only co…
> Except… there's nothing to really learn. Would you mind explaining to us how to add a disk to an array with ZFS? Then same question but with a disk which is not the same size that the rest of the array.
FWIW I honestly don't think growing an array vs adding to a pool is actually that interesting given the modern state of drives and how capacity growth has lined up with data growth across the spectrum. At the consumer/soho/small business scale growth curves for storage blew past data needs a while ago, so by the time somebody needs more storage the drives are old and it makes more sense to just replace them with much bigger ones (which ZFS supports fine, replace all the drives in an array one by one then it'll expand), or small drives will be so much cheaper that just adding another set to the pool makes sense. Much bigger then that and people aren't going to be doing array expansion ever anyway. Still, cool to see that one checked off the list, and if the functionality ultimately enables generalization to RAID-Z type conversion or better rebalancing that'd be very interesting.
>Then same question but with a disk which is not the same size that the rest of the array.
Don't do that simple as that? There isn't any great way to handle that with full performance and redundancy, and any possible value seems way way too niche to be worth bothering with. Although again if you want to add uneven vdevs (single or multidisks) to a pool you can always do that if you want.
Edit: One other practical consideration I've always had regarding expansion, adding disks and so on, is that the troublesome brute force method to me is an excuse to promote good habits and practices most of us are very lazy about in general. Having to tear down a pool and restore to get best performance and flexibility out of adding a bunch of disks is certainly a pain. But we should be able to do this at any time anyway, we should be semi-regularly testing that it works, and we do all do that testing right? Right? OK probably not, plenty of people aren't in the habit which is why automation is so important. But even if ZFS gained full perfect flexibility, I still think I wouldn't use it in general because I think the exercise of making sure that yes I can do a full restore and everything is working at least once every few years is so valuable.
Re: Examining Btrfs
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're teasing, of course, but it shows the real problems. To take you up on that with a dangerous example that reinforces the point: To add a disk to an array whose used space is less than the capacity of a single disk, you can (DON'T DO THIS, IT'S DANGEROUS) (1) remove a disk from the array (it's degraded now) (2) reformat the single disk, put all data on there (3) create a sparse file with the size of one disk (4)…
How do you do it on another FS?
mdadm --grow /dev/md1 --size=max
Re: Examining Btrfs
#44The ONLY time I've actually lost data, was with BTRFS, and only using it as a basic single-volume filesystem, no RAID, snapshots, or anything complex. BTRFS does not seem to recover well from media errors. I've had plenty of those, and always been able to recover at least partial data (minus the bad media) with other FS's.
Some testing seems to indicate even ext4 is more reliable in the face of hard power cycles.
Re: Examining Btrfs
#45Brtfs only exists as Oracle's "replacement" for ZFS, to hedge their bets in case they couldn't buy Sun. Oracle bought sun in 2010, that has been 12 years. They merged the Btrfs and ZFS teams, they then worked on ZFS entirely with no Btrfs work, and then basically reassigned, fired, or otherwise dissolved the ZFS team when it became clear that OpenZFS (Sun's chosen steward for ZFS) could not be swayed. Btrfs has had n…
This is one of the most laughably ignorant posts I've ever seen on the internet. > Btrfs has had no real work done on it since then, and anyone that is actually serious about data storage has moved to ZFS, or has left POSIX filesystems entirely Btrfs is the most actively developed filesystem in the kernel, both by LOC changed and the number of contributors. Facebook publicly stated that they run BTRFS on every webser…
ZFS is not tied to the memory allocator in Solaris, I’m very unclear how you could have made that mistake.
128bits might feel wasteful, but you’re likely never going to have the problems FAT32 has had- it’s designed for the next 100 years- which has drawbacks but prevent the kinds of ugly hacks that NTFS has gone through to maintain forward compatibility (rolling on disk upgrade).
And yes, the 1G per TB is for the in memory block map, which is a requirement for deduplucation on the default block size.
Re: Examining Btrfs
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of the most laughably ignorant posts I've ever seen on the internet. > Btrfs has had no real work done on it since then, and anyone that is actually serious about data storage has moved to ZFS, or has left POSIX filesystems entirely Btrfs is the most actively developed filesystem in the kernel, both by LOC changed and the number of contributors. Facebook publicly stated that they run BTRFS on every webser…
You’re not correct on a number of fronts here. ZFS is not tied to the memory allocator in Solaris, I’m very unclear how you could have made that mistake. 128bits might feel wasteful, but you’re likely never going to have the problems FAT32 has had- it’s designed for the next 100 years- which has drawbacks but prevent the kinds of ugly hacks that NTFS has gone through to maintain forward compatibility (rolling on disk…
> And yes, the 1G per TB is for the in memory block map, which is a requirement for deduplucation on the default block size.
You actually answered your own question: it's antiquated because of the assumption it is possible to get contiguous RAM for that mapping. On modern Linux, that is only possible if you reserve it pre-boot.
Re: Examining Btrfs
#47Brtfs only exists as Oracle's "replacement" for ZFS, to hedge their bets in case they couldn't buy Sun. Oracle bought sun in 2010, that has been 12 years. They merged the Btrfs and ZFS teams, they then worked on ZFS entirely with no Btrfs work, and then basically reassigned, fired, or otherwise dissolved the ZFS team when it became clear that OpenZFS (Sun's chosen steward for ZFS) could not be swayed. Btrfs has had n…
This is one of the most laughably ignorant posts I've ever seen on the internet. > Btrfs has had no real work done on it since then, and anyone that is actually serious about data storage has moved to ZFS, or has left POSIX filesystems entirely Btrfs is the most actively developed filesystem in the kernel, both by LOC changed and the number of contributors. Facebook publicly stated that they run BTRFS on every webser…
> This is one of the most laughably ignorant posts I've ever seen on the internet.
And say
> requires that you permanently reserve 1GB of RAM per 1TB of disk
If you want people to take you seriously. There are ways to debate on HN, this isn’t it.
Re: Examining Btrfs
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But then again, when you're starting with zero ZFS knowledge, you also need to learn the particular way it's designed. Except… there's nothing to really learn. All these weird edge cases that can kill your BTRFS simply don't exist in ZFS. The tooling is also much more polished and in the few cases that something does require user attention, it'll tell you in easily understandable terms, so as a new user the only co…
Sure, I give you that ZFS' tooling is much, much more polished. But of course there are peculiarities that have 'bitten' people (softly) in the past: - dedup has hardly any use case, novices get enticed to try something that doesn't do what they think it does - ZIL and SLOG sound like "a simple cache" when in reality they are much more complex - You can add single devices to a (redundant) pool, at which point you've…
- current versions of zfs (ie: openzfs) error (unless forced) when adding non-redundant devices to a redundant pool, and have device removal to handle the case where someone bypasses the error.
- pools can grow in zfs (ie: the things one allocates storage out of). what is probably being referenced here is that one can't reshape a zraid vdev to add more disks to it (basically the reshape operation in classic raid setups). This does make expanding in some cases less flexible that old-style raid setups.
Also, I really have to agree that ARC behavior is still not great under load, and I don't think that's that much of an edge case.
Re: Examining Btrfs
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of the most laughably ignorant posts I've ever seen on the internet. > Btrfs has had no real work done on it since then, and anyone that is actually serious about data storage has moved to ZFS, or has left POSIX filesystems entirely Btrfs is the most actively developed filesystem in the kernel, both by LOC changed and the number of contributors. Facebook publicly stated that they run BTRFS on every webser…
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the "1GB ram per TB" is for the de-duplication table. ZFS' memory cache (ARC) by default uses up to 50% of system ram and frees this under pressure. You can also set it lower.
I would add that BTRFS has no such requirements for deduplication.
Re: Examining Btrfs
#50>Moving beyond the question of individual disk reliability, btrfs-raid1 can only tolerate a single disk failure, no matter how large the total array is. The remaining copies of the blocks that were on a lost disk are distributed throughout the entire array—so losing any second disk loses you the array along with it. (This is in contrast to RAID10 arrays, which can survive any number of disk failures as long as no two…
That's simply not true. I can do a RAID-1 (mirror) with 3 drives on ZFS or mdadm and lose 2 drives. I can do it with 10 drives and lose 9.
https://www.thegeekdiary.com/how-to-add-a-3rd-disk-to-create...
>There are many use cases for RAID-0, but the author is acting like this is some kind of problem with BTRFS.
Sure, but for a novice the default advice needs to be: don't do that. And he's writing for folks with all sorts of levels of technical knowledge. Someone who knows nothing about RAID reading the article should be scared away unless they have a very, very good reason for doing RAID-0.