Yes, BtrFs was very unstable, but before. Every software has this
process.
I have talked to one of the maintainer of BtrFs, she thinks that BtrFs
is ready to production usage. (few years before, she is strongly
against using BtrFs for production purpose).
It's true that every piece of software has bugs and have to go through period of
testing. This is especially true to file systems upon which the rest of the OS has to
trust to work. However for btrfs this has already lasted 10 years with no end in sight.
We only have ideologically driven push for taking btrfs everywhere and even to places
where it makes absolutely no sense at all such as mobile phones. Also every time this
conversation happens btrfs is supposedly "very stable" and
"production-ready" except when things go wrong, and they will go wrong, at which
point btrfs proponents tell us "it's an experimental file system and not
production-ready yet, but will soon be (for your use case)" or "you weren't
following the proper use policy for btrfs". It's also undeniable fact that btrfs
has numerous bugs which can result data loss. Even this very month one of the developers
of btrfs, Zygo Blaxell, wrote that:
"We have far too many real data loss bugs in btrfs already."
Source:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-btrfs/20200619050402.GN10769@hungrycats.org/
...and how they don't want to deal with problems which aren't an actual proven
issues. Furthermore since we have this whole debate going on, it is little amazing that
not many if anyone at all has mentioned NILFS2. Even I only remembered it afterwards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NILFS
This is yet another B-tree file system but I have far more trust to it than btrfs because
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) is behind NILFS and there is an actual
real-world data backing its speed and reliability. It is demonstrably on average more
performant than Ext4 on desktops at least since one of its objectives is to be low latency
file system.
But after all, this is an open-topic we should talk about, is BtrFs
stable enough for users.
Yes, we can and we should have a discussion on this as a community. But I just have to
politely disagree about btrfs being stable enough for most users. I honestly cannot
recommend btrfs for desktop and laptop users and that is what this proposal is about. For
servers there are some benefits of using btrfs but even then the zfs or nilfs2 would
server them better.
--
Antti (Hopeakoski)