default filesystem

Josh Boyer jwboyer at fedoraproject.org
Sat Mar 1 01:34:26 UTC 2014


On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 8:21 PM, Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 08:05:34PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> Others have pointed out that the RHEL7 client uses XFS already.  I'm
>> of the opinion that ext4 vs. XFS is pretty comparable for most cases,
>> so I have no strong objections either way.
>
> I'd really like to have the discussion about whether btrfs is still a
> medium-term goal. I agree that XFS and ext4 seem basically the same, and if
> btrfs is still where we really want to go, I kind of think we should avoid
> the churn of swapping in one similar thing for another. (Since RHEL7 has
> already forked, that ship has sailed.) We talked about having btrfs/xfs
> filesystem talks at Flock -- is waiting until then too late to decide?

Are we really going to repeat the whole conversation we already had
around this earlier in the week?

To summarize where things stand:

- Btrfs is where Workstation would like to be for ease of use and
feature reasons
- Btrfs is not ready, according to everyone that actually works on the
kernel including one of the btrfs maintainers.  Waiting until Flock is
not going to change that.
- The timeframe for btrfs as a default is 6mo to a year, but it's been
in that timeframe before.  Really it boils down to how much upstream
attention it gets, who else is using it, etc.  It's hard to see the
future.  Exactly what needs to improve, be fixed, etc _can_ be talked
about at Flock and I'm still hoping to get that to happen.
- dm-thinp might be an option for some of the features, but nobody in
Workstation has looked hard at that.
- QA and Server would really like commonality across as many of the
products as possible.
- From an FS standpoint, ext4 and XFS are mostly comparable in the
Workstation case.
- One can convert ext4 to btrfs but several people would likely curl
into a ball and weep uncontrollably if that option was offered in the
installer.  It is not a sane option.

I get the churn argument, but I'm not sure how much it matters.  The
defaults are only for new installs, and I seriously doubt the
lifecycle of the first Workstation product is going to be
significantly longer than an existing Fedora release.  Early adopters
that are keen on future features can choose the custom method and go
with btrfs now.  The rest that just want something to work will have
something that works and can backup/reinstall if a significant amount
of new function is created around a future Workstation btrfs release.

So.  I'd like to crap or get off the pot now.  This is supposedly due
Monday, but every time someone insists I revisit it, it's going to
take that much longer.  Do you have something new we've missed?

josh


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