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⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

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Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#231

Post by horusthecat »

seesomesense wrote: post #79

Not surprised. I have been using BTRFS for years. Unfortunately, one gets the feeling that not too much development has been going into it.

Having been using BTRFS at home for years, i get the exact opposite impression... I've had bugs (kernel panics) that just disappear on the next update. I'm happy with the RAID1 ease of use. But even there, like some have said, manual scrub/balance--which is still nice to have--indicates a design flaw.

If I was in ops I would not use btrfs on anything but lab experiments... if i can get hardware RAID, then I can blame the vendor and the equipment

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#233

Post by jdmulloy »

rodgerd wrote: post #100
lucb1e wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bugs? I recently setup a software mirroring raid with btrfs and I'm loving features like checksumming. It makes me feel my data is quite safe and can't bit rot anymore. So far it is working fine.

Hi. Did you notice that the official description of RAID-1 is "Mostly working"? Are you aware if one of your drive fails, you have one chance to re-mirror it, before the remaining drive can no longer be mounted read-write and you need to dump the filesystem and re-create from scratch?

What do you mean by one chance to re-mirror? Does this mean that if the resilver fails you can't try it again? Is this documented? With ZFS or regular RAID as long as you have one good disk in the mirror you can resilver, is this not the case for BTRFS? If so this is quite disappointing.

There's a reason my server is running ZFS on FreeBSD. I also love jails, which let me have as many virtual servers as I want without any virtualization overhead.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#234

Post by cmurf »

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…

Fixed in 4.12.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#235

Post by lloeki »

thehardsphere wrote: post #210
feld wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Redhat and others are refusing to challenge the norm and break away from the "freeze the release; backport fixes" mantra. Stop backporting fixes. You're forking the codebase. Ship exactly what upstream provides. Teach upstream projects how to do better release engineering if they're abandoning major releases to early or breaking API/ABI in a minor release. Stop backporting fixes. You're forking th…

Taking this to its most ludicrous extreme, everyone should use Arch, and anyone who can't should... what? Not use Linux?

The Fedora Project focuses, as much as possible, on not deviating from upstream in the software it includes in the repository.

[0]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Staying_close_to_upstream_pro...

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#236

Post by cmurf »

cyphar wrote: post #132
ge0rg wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Who's they? Upstream have not removed Btrfs raid creation capability in btrfs-progs, I'm not aware of any distro that has patched it this way.

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#238

Post by user5994461 »

jameskegel wrote: post #213
josefbacik wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They brought on Zach right before I left specifically to help with the effort, but he left as well. I can't really speak to Red Hat's overall strategic decisions, but really they have a large local file system team, and a lot of them are xfs developers. You aren't going to convince Dave Chinner he should go work on Btrfs instead of XFS. Unless there's somebody internally that actually wants to work on Btrfs the work…

I'm feeling a subtext here that maybe RH isn't a desired place to work, when I've always imagined the opposite. Is this the case?

I'd read the subtext as "there are only a handful of filesystem developers in the world and the 10 of them are already settled in a good big company".

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#239

Post by cyphar »

cmurf wrote: post #236
cyphar wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Who's they? Upstream have not removed Btrfs raid creation capability in btrfs-progs, I'm not aware of any distro that has patched it this way.

Oh, I must've misunderstood this mail[1] and thought they had actually gone through with #ifdef-ing out the raid56 creation code in btrfs-progs.

My bad.

[1]: https://www.mail-archive.com/linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org/msg...

Re: ⁠Btrfs has been deprecated in RHEL

#240

Post by lunchables »

mrweasel wrote: post #54
justin66 wrote: post #24

I am as happy as anyone that XFS is finally getting the position of honor it deserves on enterprise Linux (something like 15 years later than it should have, grumble grumble) but it doesn't really take the place of what btrfs was trying to do. Only ZFS is in a position to do that. I wonder if there are any plans for supporting the native port on RHEL.

Redhat hasn't been on the best of terms with Oracle, so I suspect that they want to stay clear of ZFS. It does however leave Redhat without a more modern feature rich filesystem. Perhaps Redhat could help to develop snapshots on XFS. It's not the only feature XFS is missing, but it's a start.

What about just using LVM for snapshots? Considering that there default partition schemes include LVM maybe that's what they bank on in most use cases?
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