On Friday, September 19, 2014 10:56:59 AM Rich Freeman wrote: > On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 9:41 AM, James <wirel...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote: > > I think btrfs has tremendous potential. I tried ZFS a few times, > > but the installs are not part of gentoo, so they got borked > > uEFI, grubs to uuids, etc etc also were in the mix. That was almost > > a year ago. For what ever reason the clustering folks I have > > read and communicated with are using ext4, xfs and btrfs. Prolly > > mostly because those are mostly used in their (systemd) inspired) > > distros....? > > I do think that btrfs in the long-term is more likely to be mainstream > on linux, but I wouldn't be surprised if getting zfs working on Gentoo > is much easier now. Richard Yao is both a Gentoo dev and significant > zfs on linux contributor, so I suspect he is doing much of the latter > on the former.
Don't have the link handy, but there is an howto about it that, when followed, will give a ZFS pool running on Gentoo in a very short time. (emerge zfs is the longest part of the whole thing) Not even needed to reboot. > > Yep. the license issue with ZFS is a real killer for me. Besides, > > as an old state-machine, C hack, anything with B-tree is fabulous. > > Prejudices? Yep, but here, I'm sticking with my gut. Multi port > > ram can do mavelous things with Btree data structures. The > > rest will become available/stable. Simply, I just trust btrfs, in > > my gut. > > I don't know enough about zfs to compare them, but the design of btrfs > has a certain amount of beauty/symmetry/etc to it IMHO. I only have > studied it enough to be dangerous and give some intro talks to my LUG, > but just about everything is stored in b-trees, the design allows both > fixed and non-fixed length nodes within the trees, and just about > everything about the filesystem is dynamic other than the superblocks, > which do little more than ID the filesystem and point to the current > tree roots. The important stuff is all replicated and versioned. > > I wouldn't be surprised if it shared many of these design features > with other modern filesystems, and I do not profess to be an expert on > modern filesystem design, so I won't make any claims about btrfs being > better/worse than other filesystems in this regard. However, I would > say that anybody interested in data structures would do well to study > it. I like the idea of both and hope BTRFS will also come with the raid-6-like features and good support for larger drive counts (I've got 16 available for the filestorage) to make it, for me, a viable alternative to ZFS. -- Joost
