btrfs as default filesystem for F22?

Eric Sandeen sandeen at redhat.com
Mon Oct 6 14:30:39 UTC 2014


On 10/6/14 7:45 AM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On 10/06/2014 02:29 PM, Gene Czarcinski wrote:
> 
>> Now, there is another question which has not been voiced: what is
>> the "plan" for filessystems in Fedora (and by implication RHEL)?
>> Is it BTRFS?  Or, perhaps is it LVM with XFS?  IIRC, some time ago
>> it was stated that the plan was to move to BTRFS.  It is not clear
>> to me that everyone is onboard with that decision.  Or, perhaps
>> that decision is being reconsidered.
> 
> Let me answer from the position of a mere user. It's not clear to me
> why and when users should switch to BTRFS or xfs or else, nor am I
> not interested in using anything which would potentially endanger
> existing installations (So far, reports I am reading from openSUSE
> users don't necessarily sound convincing).
> 
> In other words, you'd have to do a lot of marketing and convincing
> work to persuade users to use BTRFS/xfs etc.
> 
> Ralf

I think this is an important point.  To make a fundamental change like
this, the rationale and benefits need to be very clearly spelled out,
and not just chase the new hotness (although 6-7 years in, I'm not sure
btrfs can be called new?  XFS certainly can't!) ;)

IOWs, I'd like to see much more than "because it can do snapshots and
checksums" as the rationale; there are most definitely interesting things
that btrfs can do (or is working on doing), but as btrfs has evolved, so has
the rest of the Linux storage ecosystem: DM thin provisioning, xfs and ext4
metadata checksums, System Storage Manager (SSM) aiming for administration
ease, etc.

It's up to those proposing a new default to clearly spell out the compelling
advantage to the change.

-Eric


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