On 05/04/17 05:03, Graham Allan wrote:
> 
>> BTRFS is billed as "open source replacement for ZFS", but after
>> testing it,
>> my impression is that it is only used by a couple of enthusiasts
>> in single-disk laptop configurations. In a single-disk system, it is not
>> clear how btrfs/zfs is better than old-plain ext4/xfs.
> 
> I've never seen any good success stories for btrfs but to be fair I have
> not followed it closely.

To be honest, it is fairly unfair to start comparing btrfs stability
with other file systems now. Even though, "ZFS on Linux" is probably the
closest to the best one to compare it against currently.  And I say "ZFS
on Linux" as there are several Linux implementations, which is different
from the original OpenSolaris implementation.

The reason is:  It takes incredibly long time to stabilize a new file
system.  And the more complex and feature rich it is, the longer it takes.

Take the history of ext4, which is based upon ext3 which is derived from
ext2.  In fact you can upgrade ext2 -> ext3 -> ext4 quite successfully.
So the whole ext2/3/4 file systems shares a lot of code.  ext2 got
introduced in 1994, ext3 in 2001 and ext4 in 2006.

For XFS, it arrived in IRIX in 1994 and arrived in Linux in 2001.

ZFS arrived in OpenSolaris in 2005.  And the Linux ports (depending on
which approach you look at) varies between 2006 and 2010.

Btrfs arrived in Linux in 2009.  And first in 2014(!) the on-disk format
was considered stable.

So btrfs do have a long journey ahead to get stabilized and become
really useful and truly integrated in larger deployments.  So expecting
btrfs to be feature rich and stable _now_ will not give any good
experiences.


-- 
kind regards,

David Sommerseth