BTRFS: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

[Eric Sandeen]

On 7/13/11 9:06 PM, Reindl Harald wrote:
> 
> 
> Am 14.07.2011 03:57, schrieb Eric Sandeen:
>>> bleeeding edge / modern technology is not the same as dangerous defaults
>>> unstable / unfinsihed packages should never be default in GA nor replace
>>> existing and over a long time well working things - never!
>>
>> You might have said the same thing about ext4 in F<whatever it was>
>> and yet, here we are, shipping it as default for many releases now, with
>> little trouble.
> 
> ext4 is not written from scratch and it is a hughe difference
> if we are speaking from a improvement of ext2/ext3 with many
> years history on all sorts of setups (desktop, server, notebook)

I am well aware of how ext4 was written, and believe me, there is
a TON of new code in there, from the allocator to the writeback
paths to the on-disk format.  ext4 has almost doubled ext3
in line count.

Something tells me if btrfs had been called "ext5" people would
just nod their heads and move on.  ;)

> the troubles of lost kde settings was enough on crashes and yes
> i had the luck of a system-disk hangig some times exactly as
> this was discussed in a way "POSIX do not say what exactly
> happens after that, it says only the FS must be clean and
> not what data are there or not"

Well, posix specifies what happens when you _sync_, but we can't
control sloppy applications which do not perform these data
integrity calls.

> virtual machines this time are really a normal thing and if
> there are hughe troubles now a FS should NOT be DEFAULT in a
> few months - why everytime this hurry? jesus one of the biggest
> benefits of open source is that there ar eno marketing idiots
> with release plans which forcing a release without enough testing

As has been said, if it's not ready, if there are instabilities
or serious deficiencies, it won't go.

-Eric

> so why do we not need this benefits and fire out permanently
> new technologies in a not understandable hurry?
> 
>