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Btrfs in Linux 6.2 brings performance improvements, better RAID 5/6 reliability

phoronix.com

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Re: Btrfs in Linux 6.2 brings performance improvements, better RAID 5/6 reliability

#91
post #27

But is the RAID handling remotely sane yet? See https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/examining-btrfs-linu... It has gems such as: * It won't boot on a degraded array by default, requiring manual action to mount it * It won't complain if one of the disks is stale * It won't resilver automatically if a disk is re-added to the array I think the first is the killer. RAID is a High Availability measure. Your system is…

Many folks I know who manage storage don't make the boot volume RAID (redundant)- instead, it's some rapidly duplicatable thing like an NMVE flash containing the root filesystem, and there's a replacement handy. Then you can bring up and bring the full power of userspace to bear on the RAID repair.

I don't get why you need to do so. RAID is not a substitute of backups, and shouldn't used that way. Meaning that of course you have a backup of the data that you can recover from.

RAID is used for two things:

1. improving the performance of slow disks (at least the read performance) 2. having 1/2 disk fail with your system remaining completely usable, till you replace the faulty disk as soon as possible.

The second point is fundamental to me: there shouldn't be any disruption of service whatsoever, meaning that only the sysadmin should notice the fault (beside maybe a reduced performance of the system since you have 1 less drive). Database transaction that were in progress when the disk did break shouldn't fail, writes/reads on the FS shouldn't fail, the only thing that should happen is an alarm triggered in the monitoring system to inform that a disk needs to be changed as soon as possible.

Having a RAID with manual recovery... it means that you could end up a Saturday evening in front of a computer to bring a system back online, and still some data corruption may have happened.

Re: Btrfs in Linux 6.2 brings performance improvements, better RAID 5/6 reliability

#92
post #47
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * It won't boot on a degraded array by default, requiring manual action to mount it That by itself is a complete deal breaker.

Why? Are you in a position where you can’t modify grub or fstab?

No, because I want to be elsewhere on a Sunday evening than in front of a computer modifying fstab to bring a production server back online.

Re: Btrfs in Linux 6.2 brings performance improvements, better RAID 5/6 reliability

#93

Maybe I'm just cynical but I think the ship has sailed for BTRFS RAID 5/6. It's now part of the global mindshare that BTRFS RAID 5/6 == data loss, no one wants to be the guinea pig that proves it works. Better to direct resources towards bcachefs or ZFS IMO.

ZFS will never be mainlined so it’s beyond useless.

What's wrong with loading the module yourself? Ubuntu is just a command away to get it running with installing zfsutils-linux.

How's that beyond useless?

Re: Btrfs in Linux 6.2 brings performance improvements, better RAID 5/6 reliability

#94

Maybe I'm just cynical but I think the ship has sailed for BTRFS RAID 5/6. It's now part of the global mindshare that BTRFS RAID 5/6 == data loss, no one wants to be the guinea pig that proves it works. Better to direct resources towards bcachefs or ZFS IMO.

Do Meta not develop btrfs for their internal use? I don't think community sentiment is a big factor for them.

Their culture of "works for me" attitude makes most stuff they care irrelevant to the rest of the world.

Re: Btrfs in Linux 6.2 brings performance improvements, better RAID 5/6 reliability

#95

Maybe I'm just cynical but I think the ship has sailed for BTRFS RAID 5/6. It's now part of the global mindshare that BTRFS RAID 5/6 == data loss, no one wants to be the guinea pig that proves it works. Better to direct resources towards bcachefs or ZFS IMO.

Ideally on a ZFS replacement that has a compatible license.

Using Ubuntu is hell of a lot faster than waiting for such a file system.

Re: Btrfs in Linux 6.2 brings performance improvements, better RAID 5/6 reliability

#97
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're already using a hobbyist operating system... Your horse isn't as high as you think.

Linux hasn’t really been a hobbyist operating system for years as anyone taking even a casual glance at a list of contributors would know but sure let’s all pretend FreeBSD is somehow relevant or properly maintained. That’s probably in the same universe where ZFS has a chance of being mainlined and isn’t heavily encumbered by Oracle owned patents. Why people would contribute to this mess is beyond me but everyone is…

You're pretending that FreeBSD isn't relevant...

You're probably behind a pfsense firewall right now.

You have probably seen someone playing games on a PlayStation 3 or 4.

You've definitely benefitted from the FreeBSD project without even realising.

Have you taken a casual glance at the list of FreeBSD contributors?

Re: Btrfs in Linux 6.2 brings performance improvements, better RAID 5/6 reliability

#98
post #3

Oh yeah, i like reliable filesystems like xfs or zfs ;)

extraneous files seroed Though I've used XFS a lot over the years. Mostly because the Debian installer gave 12yo me the choice between ext2, ext3 and xfs, so XFS it was because it sounded cooler.

I've had pacman and ext4 zero a whole bunch of system files on a forced shutdown during updates.

Reminded me of XFS back when.

Re: Btrfs in Linux 6.2 brings performance improvements, better RAID 5/6 reliability

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZFS will never be mainlined so it’s beyond useless.

ZFS is widely used by many users and organizations. Just because it is not currently included in the Linux kernel does not mean that it is useless. There is ongoing work to integrate ZFS into the Linux kernel, and in the meantime, many users continue to find value in using ZFS on their systems. As an alternative, you could try using FreeBSD, which includes ZFS as part of the kernel. This can make it easier to take ad…

> There is ongoing work to integrate ZFS into the Linux kernel

Could you paste a link to it, please? As far as I know, all efforts now are around ZoL which is not included for legal reasons.

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