Christoph Anton Mitterer posted on Tue, 29 Dec 2015 16:32:59 +0100 as excerpted:
>> From Documentation/filesystems/BTRFS.txt: >> Btrfs is under heavy development, and is not suitable for any uses >> other than benchmarking and review. > Well I guess now it's time for Duncan's usual "stable or not" talk > (@Duncan, I think by now, you should have made it into some verse or > ballad form... :D for general pleasure ;) ) =:^) The devs did remove most of the experimental warnings some versions ago. I guess they missed that one. The "heavy development" part is definitely still correct, but with the caveats below, I don't believe the "only benchmarking and review" fits the generally held list position, these days. As I normally put it, btrfs is "definitely stabilizING, but not yet entirely stable and mature." What that means in real life is that while not yet recommended for production use where down time costs money and potentially jobs, it's generally ready for routine daily use, PROVIDED one observes the usual admin's rule of backups, that for any level of backup, either you have it, or you consider the data it would cover to be worth less than the hassle and resources that backup would take, modified by the risk factor of actually having to use the backup. Because btrfs is still stabilizing, that risk factor remains somewhat elevated, so you better have at least 1-2 levels of backup if you don't consider the data of trivial throw-away value. Beyond that, keeping up with the list and staying relatively current with your kernel and btrfs-progs userspace are strongly recommended as well. But it's definitely not recommended yet for the conservative stability types that run half a decade old "stable" enterprise distros. That sort of use-case is in basic conflict with where btrfs is at this point, and people wishing to run it should be looking to some other filesystem, or if they /do/ choose to take up the enterprise distros on their offer of support for btrfs, should be looking to them for that support, as it's them that are choosing to offer it, while the general position on the list seems to be "that's insane". Similarly of course for those unwilling to do backups or run relatively current kernels and btrfs userspace, or to keep up with the list. In that case, btrfs isn't an appropriate choice for them. But while not entirely stable and mature yet, that's still rather beyond "not suitable for any uses other than benchmarking and review", and indeed, most of the other wording of that nature was stripped around kernel 3.12, and while some of us considered that a bit early, I think most would agree that the "benchmarking and review" only wording is somewhat dated, by now. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
