On 3/12/18, Leonid Isaev via arch-general <arch-general@archlinux.org> wrote: > On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 10:24:37PM +0000, Carsten Mattner via arch-general > wrote: >> On 3/12/18, Eli Schwartz via arch-general <arch-general@archlinux.org> >> wrote: >> > On 03/11/2018 10:00 PM, Carsten Mattner via arch-general wrote: >> >> I'm happy to hear that. My rationale is based on past observations >> >> of needlessly heated arguments and ZFS, due to its license splitting >> >> the Linux community in half, appearing to be perfect fuel for such >> >> a thread. >> >> >> >> Thanks for the wiki links. Never used ZFS on Linux because I avoid >> >> out of kernel patches. Maybe I will give it a try on Linux as well. >> > >> > Well yes, the main reason people get heated about it I think is because >> > it is out-of-tree kernel modules and as such are less reliably stable >> > or >> > some such. >> > >> > Based on how well archzfs keeps their binary repos up to date, I'm not >> > 100% convinced on the stability. Moreso consider that it's difficult to >> > bootstrap a system without zfs available, and if their binary repo does >> > not match the current archiso... >> >> I'll stay away from it, thanks. I saw that Alpine Linux has good ZFS >> support, but I didn't do anything serious with it. When it comes to >> filesystems, I'm conservative, EXT4 and XFS on Linux. It's a pity >> there's no modern filesystem to share volumes between FOSS kernels. >> It's all some compromise that you might or might not accept. > > What's wrong with btrfs? Yeah, I know it is not marked "stable", but this > is just a label. And people shying away from it doesn't help in advancing > its stability either.
btrfs never got on my radar because it's Linux only and its instability is a blocker. If I have to be careful how I use a filesystem even when I didn't explicitly enable beta features, I'm too scared to put my files on it. If I were a Suse Enterprise customer, I might use it, but Red Hat isn't behind it anymore, so it's like Reiser3 back in the day. Only Suse was putting their weight behind it. Well Facebook has developers on it, but Facebook isn't a distro developer and can't be trusted with continued maintenance, since they might switch on a weekend to some Facebook-FS. Facebook has too many engineers and is reinventing stuff in-house a lot. btrfs and zfs suffer from design limitations, but zfs has been stable and in petabyte production for a long time across many organizations. btrfs is one of many future Linux filesystems with no clear winner so far. It looks like XFS will gain full checksums and scrubbing before btrfs gets reliable and Red Hat's XFS++ work will provide snapshots. It's like git replacing bitkeeper in 2005. Seems like XFS++ will do the same with btrfs left to history of experiments. All I want is a modern filesystem whose volume I can share without exposing it via a network protocol.
