Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 Deprecates Btrfs

[arokh]

Been using BTRFS on Arch for years as well both on my laptops and on my NUC. 0 problems except for one time when I upgraded to a pre-release kernel and it crashed at boot. Managed to repair the FS though.

[Michael_S]

WTF? By the way if someone with some knowledge of btrfs has some suggestions I'm having quite a few problems with it: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp...ms.btrfs/56036

I don't have the level of expertise required to help, sorry. I've been using btrfs at home without issues, and I really hope it continues to mature into something that can toe off against ZFS in every respect.

[PreparationH67]

According to the Red Hat guy that I did not know was in the IRC channel I started a discussion about this on, it seems it is a case of bad wording. BTRFS will still be tech preview in RHEL 7, according to him, and the note is supposed to mean that a RHEL TP feature should either transition to fully supported OR depreciated once that RHEL version hits production phase 2 support. Since they don't plan on fully supporting BTRFS under RHEL 6.8, it is being depreciated. So the other posters were correct in speculating that this actually meant that "RHEL's development of BTRFS in RHEL 6.8 has been discontinued".

[jacob]

It's not just *suse. Ubuntu has also supported btrfs for years. It's not the default FS, but installing directly into btrfs subvolumes, booting from them etc. is perfectly supported out of the box. I have been using it for a while now and couldn't be happier with it.

[cjcox]

Pretty typical Red Hat. At least it never left technology preview there. Unlike... for example Xen. RH: Xen is crap, we should know we wrote most of it. RH: Xen is great! Everybody (re)purchase RHEL 4.5, it has Xen! Xen ftw! RH: Xen is deprecated.

[anarki2]

Only the zealots and fanboys did not see this coming. ZFS has a 10 years proven track record, is deployed by the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies, has an open alliance supporting ZFS on pretty much all platforms except Windows and has Oracle backing it. There were no promises and big future plans, only a solid, feature-rich and performant file system right from the start.

Btrfs, on the other hand, is still nothing more than an ever going beta where fsck counts as a serious milestone, developed by a handful of devs and used by almost no one except Facebook. It was really a pipe dream thinking it will ever get mainstream. It's been almost 10 years and still no maturity or momentum. I mean yeah, Mason WAS at Oracle, and now at Facebook, the same Facebook who basically rewrote PHP and MySQL. So yeah, who cares? They'll use it internally and that's there's to it. You get ZFS on Solaris, FreeBSD and Ubuntu. Where did you get Btrfs? SUSE and RHEL. And now only on SUSE. No, really, noone gives a d@mn about Btrfs. Let it go. Yeah, it's available on Arch or whatever random distro, yay. Let's be honest: it has literally ZERO business impact, guys.

Edit: and yeah, all those guys running this "with zero issues" on your desktop or home NAS or whatever playground you have, we're so happy for you, but that won't change a thing either.

[chrisb]

WTF? By the way if someone with some knowledge of btrfs has some suggestions I'm having quite a few problems with it: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp...ms.btrfs/56036

You say your system has buggy hardware support. It's possible that some driver is corrupting btrfs data structures in memory, when you reisub this gets flushed and checked on next mount, which fails.

If you can reproduce the problem, and it does not occur in earlier kernels, then you can bisect to find the bad commit. Perhaps you can automate the reproducer. Try a standard distribution kernel (eg Debian), in case there any issues with your custom config. If still no hints, try reproducing with a minimal kernel config - if the problem goes away, keep adding hardware support until it reappears. You can also try cloning your system to other hardware and verify whether or not the issue occurs there. Also try different methods of rebooting and syncing and different power management - it may be that the SSD controller is mishandling flush on reboot in a low power state or something.

Unfortunately this is all very time consuming and modern hardware can be complex to debug. Fwiw the only btrfs crashes I've had also came from memory corruption.

[r1348]

Only the zealots and fanboys did not see this coming. ZFS has a 10 years proven track record, is deployed by the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies, has an open alliance supporting ZFS on pretty much all platforms except Windows and has Oracle backing it. There were no promises and big future plans, only a solid, feature-rich and performant file system right from the start.

Btrfs, on the other hand, is still nothing more than an ever going beta where fsck counts as a serious milestone, developed by a handful of devs and used by almost no one except Facebook. It was really a pipe dream thinking it will ever get mainstream. It's been almost 10 years and still no maturity or momentum. I mean yeah, Mason WAS at Oracle, and now at Facebook, the same Facebook who basically rewrote PHP and MySQL. So yeah, who cares? They'll use it internally and that's there's to it. You get ZFS on Solaris, FreeBSD and Ubuntu. Where did you get Btrfs? SUSE and RHEL. And now only on SUSE. No, really, noone gives a d@mn about Btrfs. Let it go. Yeah, it's available on Arch or whatever random distro, yay. Let's be honest: it has literally ZERO business impact, guys.

Edit: and yeah, all those guys running this "with zero issues" on your desktop or home NAS or whatever playground you have, we're so happy for you, but that won't change a thing either.

Wow, way to make yourself a fool in public!

It was just bad wording: brtfs is supported and eventually will be default, move along, nothing to see...

[jacob]

Only the zealots and fanboys did not see this coming. ZFS has a 10 year proven track record, is deployed by the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies, has an open alliance supporting ZFS on pretty much all platforms except Windows and has Oracle backing it. There were no promises and big future plans, only a solid, feature-rich and performant file system right from the start.

Btrfs, on the other hand, is still nothing more than an ever going beta where fsck counts as a serious milestone, developed by a handful of devs and used by almost no one except Facebook. It was really a pipe dream thinking it will ever get mainstream. It's been almost 10 years and still no maturity or momentum. I mean yeah, Mason WAS at Oracle, and now at Facebook, the same Facebook who basically rewrote PHP and MySQL. So yeah, who cares? They'll use it internally and that's there's to it. You get ZFS on Solaris, FreeBSD and Ubuntu. Where did you get Btrfs? SUSE and RHEL. And now only on SUSE. No, really, noone gives a d@mn about Btrfs. Let it go.

Edit: and yeah, all those guys running this "with zero issues" on your desktop or home NAS or whatever playground you have, we're so happy for you, but that won't change a thing.

Oh yeah, the Zealot's File System has a 10-year proven track record of requiring a dedicated supercomputer to perform basic IO operations and still not supporting xattrs - I'm talking real xattrs, that is fast and atomic, not the poor man's substitute of separate files in a hidden directory. BUT, on the positive side, it is backed by Oracle!</sarcasm>.

Chris Mason is at Facebook and guess what, he's not rewriting PHP there. Actually Facebook's production data are on Btrfs today. It is even possible that Facebook may not be running entirely off a home NAS, you never know!

And now seriously: both ZFS and Btrfs have their issues but also their strong points and BOTH are actively developed. Btrfs is being used in the real world, is supported in SUSE, Ubuntu, RHEL (yes, RHEL) >= 7 and, besides Facebook, its development is also backed by Intel, Fujitsu, Netgear and - guess who? - Oracle. It's just that I find the incessant ZFS fanboyism particularly tiresome, these guys could give Apple hipsters a run for their money. If you really can't stand Btrfs, noone is forcing you to use it, but I'm afraid it's not going anywhere. You will have to live with that ;-)

[M@yeulC]

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.