Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 Deprecates Btrfs

[edgmnt]

They probably meant they were no longer developing BTRFS integration within RHEL, not that it was no longer being developed upstream.

[tajjada]

BTRFS is an absolutely amazing thing. My main filesystem with all my data is btrfs, and is several years old now. It has survived multiple hardware failures (including water being poured over my motherboard), multiple conversions between different RAID levels, lots of bad cpu, cache, and ram overclocks, including the lots and lots of memory corruptions and kernel panics that naturally come with such things, and lots of oddly-specific "incidents" when the MS Windows installer would for some reason write all over btrfs's superblocks and other data and metadata and corrupt stuff (despite the fact that I clearly told it to use a different disk drive and not touch my btrfs HDDs), and then still fail installing Windows, until I physically unplugged every disk except the one that I wanted to install Windows on, and booted that way.

That said, I am "just" a home user. I am sure corporate / big data people are a lot more serious about their data.

And of course, I do have backups of my most important stuff.

[edgmnt]

They probably meant to say they ceased development of BTRFS integration within that version of RHEL, as opposed to upstream development. That, or the release notes reference an unfortunate template for deprecated features.

[edgmnt]

They probably meant to say they ceased development of BTRFS integration within that version of RHEL, as opposed to upstream development. That, or the release notes reference an unfortunate template for deprecated features.

[thelongdivider]

BTRFS is my choice FS on hard drives. This would have been a disaster for RHEL.

[nanonyme]

Well, I think it makes sense to disable it, if running on an older kernel, like this old RH version probably does. It' safer; and you'd better upgrade anyway if you want the new features and improved reliability.

Pretty sure this is exactly what they meant. They consider the version that was in those kernels dangerous at this point (as do Btrfs developers, there's probably still "might eat your disk" level of bugs in RHEL 6.2 kernel Btrfs) and they don't want to spend time and money backporting new versions of Btrfs to RHEL 6.2 kernels. It makes sense to tell loudly people should use the old Btrfs preview at their own risk in this case

[Shimon]

Maybe they meant BTFS?

[starshipeleven]

Actually Facebook's production data are on Btrfs today.

AFAIK facebook has production WEBservers on btrfs. Webservers are the expendable ones and don't need large multiTB arrays.

Database servers aren't running btrfs, because a database server going down is a BIG issue, AND because in 99.99% of the cases their database has checksums already anyway so btrfs isn't terribly necessary there.

[henrik]

Neither ZFS or BTRFS gives me what I need so I just run ext4 with an intrusion detection system + regular backups. I need to know about (and recover from) if files are modified or deleted, no matter if it was me, a virus, a kernel bug or crappy hardware that did it. ZFS and BTRFS only takes care of the last two cases (or very last one). Only an intrusion detection system (which keeps track of all my files) + regular backup can cover for all cases. Or?
The intrusion detection system is really simple. It's a little command called "integrit" which builds a database of all files and then lets me diff changes month over month.

[pal666]

Ubuntu has also supported btrfs for year

"supported" means fixing kernel bugs. how many kernel btrfs developers are employed by canonical?