Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

news.ycombinator.com

41–50 of 71 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#41
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone can afford a dedicated NAS/file server.

No one designing defaults for a home distro will tune it for the server use case by default, so raid 5 considerations are totally irrelevant to OP's question.

I hate to break it to you, but distros have been supporting lvm and mdadm for decades.

The only thing(s) that define a "server" distro are support contracts and ego. Ubuntu server is no different than standard Ubuntu when both use and can run the exact same packages.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#42
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one designing defaults for a home distro will tune it for the server use case by default, so raid 5 considerations are totally irrelevant to OP's question.

I hate to break it to you, but distros have been supporting lvm and mdadm for decades. The only thing(s) that define a "server" distro are support contracts and ego. Ubuntu server is no different than standard Ubuntu when both use and can run the exact same packages.

I think we can both see that the question has been about defaults, which differ between Ubuntu server and standard.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#43
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I prefer ReiserFS, it has always been a killer file system in my view.

Yes, it has that one killer feature the other FSs so not have.

I'm not a fan of my wife so that feature is amazing!

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu Lunar Lobster now also uses BTRFS instead of ZFS by default with the new Flutter-based installer. It's also the suggested FS for Arch and Gentoo.

ZFS was never the default in Ubuntu

I was pretty sure it was, it was using ext4 as the default then I imagine? Anyways, the change then was that ZFS is not an option anymore instead of stopping being the default.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#45
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't heard of him objecting to the Sun origins of ZFS, but he has warned people away from ZFS on the grounds of Oracle's litigious reputation: > And honestly, there is no way I can merge any of the ZFS efforts until I get an official letter from Oracle that is signed by their main legal counsel or preferably by Larry Ellison himself that says that yes, it's ok to do so and treat the end result as GPL'd. > Other…

Could GPL be amended to be compatible with ZFS? Something along the lines of a legal shim. (Clearly Linus already said no to this in extension.)

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#47
post #46

My raspberry pi with a slightly power supply got the filesystem into a state I couldn't recover it from when I tested it last. I am using it again but on a NAS with a backup battery.

How long ago did that happen?

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#49

I’ve heard it lacks maturity and of a few cases of data corruption. Those cases are no doubt outdated now, but I haven’t heard any news to sway me that BTRFS is ready for prime time. Ditto for ZFS btw.

Facebook was deploying BTRFS 5 years ago.[0] I haven't heard that they've changed or had any data corruption issues. In fact, they've integrated zstd compression into BTRFS. [0] https://engineering.fb.com/2018/10/30/open-source/linux/

Facebook runs servers a lot different than a home oriented distro is likely to be run. I was there through aquisition from late 2014 to late 2019, and I mostly avoided production operations in FB land.

I don't remember hearing about any power failures --- either UPS and transfer switches all worked 100%, node replacement covered any issues 100%, or I just wasn't in the loop. This isn't common at home; most people have at least a few brief power blips every once in a while, and those with many often get a UPS, but home grade UPSes often fail. I'd expect at least one unexpected power failure per 3 years in a home environment.

Most of FB production is built from ephemeral containers. If a container host crashes and restarts and the filesystem is corrupt, the container would be rescheduled somewhere else, and the host would be sent for repair (reimaging) automagically, and a product team like mine would not really know unless they really looked, maybe just that the container moved. That's not realistic for home users.

The containers themselves were short lived for many reasons. I'd estimate most of them lived for less than a month. A home user distro install often lasts much longer.

That said, I don't remember seeing disk corruption, but I do remember a series of issues where we couldn't write to disk because it was full, with disk usage of maybe 60%. As I recall, there was only one couple week period where that happened. This was resolved in the moment by replacing affected containers with new ones on other hosts, and permanently by a fix in the host kernels; broken filesystems were not fixed, they were abandoned. This isn't great for home users either.

There was a separate class of operations for persistent data storage; although there was work to containerize that as well, I had little visibility. Persistent storage machines were different and I don't know if they used btrfs or not.

This all doesn't mean it's not a good filesystem for home users, just that Facebook's endorsement doesn't transfer as the use case is much different.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#50
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I prefer ReiserFS, it has always been a killer file system in my view.

Yes, it has that one killer feature the other FSs so not have.

I see what you did there! :')
Post reply on HN