Lead Btrfs FIle-System Developers Join Facebook

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Lead Btrfs FIle-System Developers Join Facebook

Chris Mason and another lead Btrfs developer have sent out a kernel patch today updating their email addresses as they will be joining Facebook to work on the Linux file-system...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTUzNTE

[mark45]

It's been in development for like 5 years already and still no final format, no stable release. It's one of those projects I stopped caring about.

[smitty3268]

It's been in development for like 5 years already and still no final format, no stable release. It's one of those projects I stopped caring about.

You cared enough to read this and post a comment.

[xeekei]

It's been in development for like 5 years already and still no final format, no stable release. It's one of those projects I stopped caring about.

Since you commented, I think you care. You're just frustrated like the rest of us. Let's hope Facebook can cram more manhours out of these guys. They probably have deeper pockets than Fusion-IO. Maybe it isn't manhours that's bottlenecking the Btrfs progress though.

[deanjo]

Jeez, can't these guys keep a job? ;D

[enjolras]

Designing a filesystem of this level of complexity is obviously hard. I mean, really hard. And that's why there are not much hackers around there which can work on this sort of stuff. We should accept that this sort of project take times to mature.

That being said, I feel like there is an issue in the way btrfs projects is conducted. But my opinion should be taken which a lot of skepticism, since i'm not really qualified to talk neither about btrfs himself nor about its development.

I feel like they are not doing it in the right order. It's true that to fix a disk layout, memory structures and core algorithms, you need to design it as a whole, thinking about the feature you will implement. But adding features like compressions before having a fsck tool does not look rights. Maybe it would have been better to stabilized a core set of features, and start adding new ones like raid, compression, dedup, etc after this stabilization pass.

[GreatEmerald]

Facebook, that's interesting. There's a division of Facebook working with the D language, so Facebook funds a portion of its development, too. In case of D, they use it as a framework for code testability and stability. I wonder what their interest in Btrfs is... Probably reliable data storage. Overall the change probably doesn't mean much, as Fusion-io is a fairly large company as well.

enjolras, no, the priorities are quite fine. Btrfs doesn't need a fsck, because it does all the checking and repair at runtime (which can also be manually forced with scrub), while recovery is done via mount options. There is little reason to also make an offline tool for it.

[Akka]

I feel like they are not doing it in the right order. It's true that to fix a disk layout, memory structures and core algorithms, you need to design it as a whole, thinking about the feature you will implement. But adding features like compressions before having a fsck tool does not look rights. Maybe it would have been better to stabilized a core set of features, and start adding new ones like raid, compression, dedup, etc after this stabilization pass.

Are you sure they plan develop a fsck tool at all? I don't think zfs has it? I thought it was unnecessary for this sort of file system?

[Ericg]

Are you sure they plan develop a fsck tool at all? I don't think zfs has it? I thought it was unnecessary for this sort of file system?

Ideally Btrfs will either have the old data, or the new data. Never a middle issue resulting in corruption. BUT thats ideally and in theory, so you could run into situations where everything just gets completely hosed either due to FS bugs or completely random uncontrollable outside factors

[k1l_]

Facebook, that's interesting. [?] I wonder what their interest in Btrfs is... Probably reliable data storage. ?

Yes i first thought: Facebook?!?!
But they have to store a lot of data so i guess they want to speed that development a bit. Or push that into a direction that suits them best.