Plans for BTRFS in Fedora

Josef Bacik josef at toxicpanda.com
Tue Feb 22 19:51:50 UTC 2011


Hello,

So we're getting close to having a working fsck tool so I wanted to
take the opportunity to talk about the future of BTRFS in Fedora.
Coming up in F15 we're going to have the first release of Fedora where
we don't need the special boot option to have the ability to format
you filesystem as BTRFS.  This is in hopes that we can open it up for
wider testing before possibly making it the default filesystem.  I
realize we're in the early stages of F15, but since filesystems are
big and important I'd like to get an idea of the amount of work that
needs to still be done to get BTRFS in shape for being Fedora's
default filesystem.  So here are my goals

1) Fedora 16 ships with BTRFS as the default root filesystem.
2) Fedora 16 ships without LVM as the volume manager and instead use
BTRFS's built in volume management, again just for the default.

Fedora 16 is a very aggressive target, which is also why I'm bringing
it up now.  I think we will be ready by then.  We have had the ability
to install Fedora onto BTRFS since F11, and I have been testing it
since then without too many issues.  Some things that I know are going
to be gotcha's at this point

1) GRUB support.  Edward Shishkin did GRUB1 patches for BTRFS a while
ago, but they were obviously never merged upstream and were also not
included into fedora.  These would either need to be cleaned up and
put into our grub package, or we'd need to put /boot on a different
filesystem.  I personally hate the idea of having a non-btrfs /boot
partition but I'm not the one in charge of GRUB.

2) Anaconda support.  I've already talked with Will Woods about this
some.  Really anaconda will format a normal disk with BTRFS with no
problem today, the biggest issue here is adding the volume management
stuff and allowing users to create subvolumes via anaconda.

3) All the various little tools that we have for putting together
LiveCD's that are very ext* centered.  I've not even looked at this
yet, but I assume it's going to be kind of a pain.

4) FSCK does actually need to be finished.  I don't see this as a
problem as Chris is 90% done with it at this point so it should be
ready even before F15 ships, but it's worth mentioning.

I would really like to see a lot of testing on BTRFS in the F15 cycle
just so we know how well it works in the non-developer's use case.
It's easy for me to use it because I work on it and I understand the
limitations, so it would be nice to have much broader testing.

So what are your thoughts?  Thanks,

Josef


More information about the devel mailing list