Btrfs Merged Into Mainline Linux Kernel

Btrfs, the next-generation Linux file-system conceived by Oracle and designed to compete with some of the features found in Sun's ZFS file-system, has just been merged for the Linux 2.6.29 kernel.

Last week we shared that Btrfs was getting ready for the mainline kernel and since then Chris Mason and other kernel hackers have committed several commits to the btrfs-unstable tree. There have been 21 commits to this new open-source file-system in the past four days.

This morning Linus Torvalds finally pulled Btrfs into the mainline kernel. This file-system can be built using the CONFIG_BTRFS_FS option. Besides the kernel module, there are also the Btrfs utilities that will also need to be fetched by interested users.

With this file-system that brings several advantages over EXT4 now landing in the Linux kernel plus kernel mode-setting and other features, the Linux 2.6.29 kernel is looking to be an interesting release. More on the Btrfs file-system can be read about on their project web-site.