default file system, was: Comparison to Workstation Technical Specification

[Stephen Gallagher]

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On 02/26/2014 11:42 AM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2014-02-26 at 11:14 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
>> On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 02:59:00PM +0000, Colin Walters wrote:
>>>> Yeah, agreed here.  Everyone wants the latest shiniest thing,
>>>> even if that thing isn't ready.  I really don't want to wade
>>>> through tons of bug reports for btrfs just because it has a
>>>> lot of hype.
>>> Also, right now cloud is plain old ext4.   Let's see if we can
>>> ship *all* of the filesystems!  It'll be fun!
>> 
>> Cloud could switch to XFS along with server. The main problem is
>> that it'd make us revisit booting -- either 1) some work into
>> lightening up grub2, 2) testing and possibly enhancing syslinux's
>> xfs support, or 3) a separate /boot with a different filesystem.
>> I don't really love any of those options.
> 
> I'm always dubious of 'there shall be only one' decrees - be it 
> installers or desktop environments or file systems.
> 


I have no problems (personally) about allowing the different products
to select different default filesystems. The reason people choose
different filesystems is to serve different workloads, so I think this
is just an extension of that.


> Also, as has already been pointed out: there are Fedora systems
> out there using ext4, xfs, btrfs and probably a few other file
> systems today. If we now suddenly change track and consider btrfs
> not 'safe enough', wasn't it pretty irresponsible of us to let
> people use it for their installations ?
> 


I think we're saying "it's not stable enough for the *default*".
That's a different statement from "it's not stable enough for use".


> For the workstation, I think the options are
> 
> - switch to btrfs soon to give it the exposure it needs to get
> ready (while being careful to limit the supported features, as suse
> does)
> 

I'm slightly in favor of this for the Workstation, personally. Without
wide adoption, btrfs will never get any better.


> - stick with ext4 until we have some user-visible features (time 
> slider...) that make a switch to btrfs very attractive
> 

Certainly an acceptable answer as well. I don't really see any
compelling arguments for XFS in this workload.
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