For those brave enough to test the latest kernels and/or BRTFS: http://chakr...

It's worth to install experiment/test and report findings of it, but in a virtualbox for me.. People should be excited about this software because drives are getting burdening big in the terabytes, and ext4 can shortcoming and lacks behind even ntfs.. BTRFS will solve so many issues that is even lacking with reiserfs :).. ZFS is in userland and it's native counterpart was released just a couple of weeks ago..

Also that post you mentioned, part of the reason falls on not having the latest grub update. It's possible you're not using btrfs support properly with grub..in certain respects..

The btrfsck according to the site also is still in development, so nobody is saying BTRFS is primetime ready..

Should BTRFS be avoided? It's an experimental filesystem.. But it looks like 5 filesystems into one because it's a sophisticated project from what I can tell..

I think people should check it out (but try it in a virtualbox), there's a cool feature such as "Conversion of existing ext3/4 file.. Can help folks adopt BTRFS while encouraging feedback for it..

May 10, 2013

Durval Menezes+1

+Scott Westlake
Actually, Native ZFS (aka ZFSOnLinux) has been around at least since February 2011 (ie, 2 years and then some, see the rightmost column of http://zfsonlinux.org/download.html). What happened more recently (in March 27th, to be precise) was the release of version 0.6.1, which was finally deemed "ready for wide-scale deployments" by the developers: see http://goo.gl/iII9x)

But the ZFSOnLinux developers are known to be a very careful bunch, and a lot of people has been considering it stable enough for production use for considerably more than a year).

Also, it's important to consider that the ZFSOnLinux project is all about porting the filesystem into the kernel; so, the ZFS "core" (design, central algorithms, etc: ie, >99% of the code) which has been released and is production use in Solaris and other systems since 2005, has been hardly being touched by the port. in fact, the ZFSOnLinux developers have written the SPL (Solaris Porting Layer) exactly for isolating most of the differences between Linux and Solaris.

Apart from being more stable right now, ZFS has administrative facilities and a feature list that puts BTRFS to shame: see a good comparison here: http://rudd-o.com/linux-and-free-software/ways-in-which-zfs-is-better-than-btrfs

What this means is that even when BTRFS is ready for production use, it will still lag behind ZFS in features and administration ease... so, why use BTRFS at all? :-) Just the fact that it's GPL (and so able to be embedded into the kernel source tree) doesn't seem enough, specially considering that CDDL (the ZFS license) is a bona fide open source license, according to the OSI: http://opensource.org/licenses/CDDL-1.0

May 11, 2013

Scott WestlakeOwner+1

I had a discussion about this with someone..

BTRFS is not even released yet(from the way I understand it as a 'stable' release). I don't know why you're judging it and trying to dismiss it because BTRFS is being led in development by Oracle..the same company that owns the ZFS trademark

The nodal posts are for educating users about Linux.. I didn't delete your post from the page, I transferred/shared it to *Discussion,

BTRFS is not universally ready prime-time on Linux, but it's already available on openSuse's latest installer (as a few weeks ago), which is why I added it's post.. and I like to emphasize disambiguity.. BTRFS is experimental.. I keep my posts simplest as I can.

ZFS came out of experimentation after 2 years.. but I'm don't make posts because something doesn't work.. BTRFS is not ready, I mentioned it and still recommend meanwhile to users to be very wary of it despite the fact openSuse offers it on it's "stable" 12.3 installer..

"Development began at Oracle Corporation in 2007."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs

My understanding is Oracle wants a successor filesystem to ZFS.. there has to be a reason why Oracle is pushing development not into ZFS but rather into BTRFS..

Please look at the greater picture.. I really don't care what filesystem people use, as long as it's stable. If it's not considered stable and is offered widely right up front on a Linux installer or Desktop, etc, I have no problem making a post to people who are new to Linux to be extra careful even if I'm not using it..

https://plus.google.com/105696767572828808697/posts/gvJJKEW18QD

May 11, 2013

Durval Menezes+2

+Scott Westlake Please don't take it the wrong way: I think we are more in agreement than in disagreement. For example, I fully agree with your idea to test any new filesystem in a VM first, and you seem to agree that BTRFS is far from being ready for prime time. Also, we both agree that stability in a filesystem is paramount.

What we seem to disagree on is about the current status of ZFS: I (and many others) consider it more than ready for production use, and you seem to think otherwise, and keeps trying to find things to support your view which are mostly incorrect (like your original statement that its "native counterpart was released just a couple of weeks ago").

Regarding your latest response, I also disagree with you about the kind of strategy Oracle seems to have with BTRFS: I don't think they see it as a "successor" to ZFS at all. The way I see it is that, when development started on BTRFS (by Chris Mason, who does not even work for Oracle anymore), Sun was still a healthy company, the US hadn't entered the 2008 Great Depression and the thought of Sun being sold to a database vendor would have been laughed at. Of course, the 2008 crisis changed all that... but that was after BTRFS started development, so of course Oracle at that time couldn't be seeing it as any kind of "sucessor" to ZFS (albeit it could as a competitor).

So, what would be Oracle's strategy regarding ZFS vs BTRFS? It's anyone's guess, but my bet is that Oracle is still busy "digesting" Sun and finding out what it should do with all the assets it has acquired, specially the open source ones like ZFS. The fact that they haven't "divested" or "given it away" like they did with OpenOffice seems promising, though.

For now, ZFS development with Oracle seems to be progressing at a steady pace: the zpool version number (a good indicator of changes in the underlying code) has been incremented from 14 to 34 (!) since Oracle's acquisition [1].

On the other hand, Oracle's contributions to BTRFS seems to have dwindled: if you look at the BTRFS GIT stats [2], you will see that not a single one of the top 10 contributors works for Oracle... so it doesn't seem that Oracle is investing a lot in BTRFS, which they should if they were seeing it as a "sucessor" in any way.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Comparisons
[2] http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/mason/linux-btrfs.git/stats/

May 12, 2013

Scott WestlakeOwner

There's alot of anonymous commits with the Linux kernel that counts as a significant amount of proportion. (Linux Developer video conference). Just because someone is not committing under a company name doesn't mean certain companies aren't contributing.. but I don't see why you're stretching your imagination I'm totally against ZFS and the original intention of the post is not to persuade a favoring and bashing another(like the way you did).

If you want to bash out BTRFS, you should take your frustrations over to the openSuse team as they're the ones rolling it on their "STABLE" installers.. The purpose of the post is to educate users of the available BTRFS that is showing up on openSuse and another Linux distro, right from their installers. If people want to try ZFS, then let them do so.

Read the comments carefully.
Your post about ZFS was about ranting about problems of Linux. You can rant/bashing about things, but this sort of language would be on the Discussion node. If you want to post about a filesystem you can but all the software herein has to be GPL licensed...and the post should be simple and friendly so that new users can understand

You can mention non-GPL software, but you can have it on the Discussion node..

The reason why I condone GPL software is because the particular software is 1) Immediately available for Linux (via it be with the kernel, etc), and 2) It would be on pretty much any Distro because of the GPL license.. this makes Linux easy to adopt and use right after installing it

I should also mention that I'm very prudent to exFAT, and elaborated that even though it's origins are not opensource (but the current Linux driver is completely opensource/GPL after reverse-engineering), I had to make an exception because it's so persistently being sought out by all the new users. Also Debian 7 officially bundles this exFAT driver to my very disapproval because it's not in their "non-free" or contrib repository-- where the argument Debian uses is that software patents are not largely enforced by their holders..

.. but the exFAT opensource driver is GPL, so it's not entirely against the interests I'm trying to facilitate into the reasons why people should adopt Linux. ExFat is immediately available upon installation on Linux(Debian 7, and I'm sure others too because of the many derivatives. and even though it's not part of the Linux kernel tree, it is available as a fuse filesystem)

(The main theme of this gplus community page, is to demonstrate the simplicity of Linux)

I've made /Node sections to elaborate more advanced topics.. but zfs isn't gpl, if it was, I might include it.. But I didn't delete your post entirely did i? (I created it as a share on the discussion node, this is the second time I'm telling ya) The nodes aren't meant for ranting and bashing things as "puts BTRFS to shame".. I think you're not educating anybody about why this gplus page is set. I'm just making Linux easier to understand of it's available software that new users and even advanced users (/Advanced sections with the slash), can relate to.. Please keep life simple and CALM DOWN.

May 12, 2013

Durval Menezes

+Scott Westlake I find it curious that you insist in propagating untrue (or at least very debatable) information just to prove your point; for example, you imply that Oracle's contribution to BTRFS is being done in an anonymous manner, which is simply not the case: look at the list of minor contributors, and you will see some from Oracle. What makes you think that some of them are contributing anonymously, and others not?

Also, I do not want to bash BTRFS, but simply to introduce people to ZFS, which is a stable alternative that does everything BTRFS plans to do one day, but does it now, and with production-level quality. Also, please note that ZOL is present from the start in some distributions (Sabayon among others) and is readily installable in most of the others in a very simple way (for example, for Debian and Ubuntu it's a simple matter of adding a PPA).

You seem to have a resistance against non-GPL software; as I mentioned, you should note that ZFS is, albeit non-GPL, truly open-source. By restricting yourself to GPL-only software, I think you are doing a disservice to the linux beginner community which you purport to serve, as there are many useful pieces of non-GPL software running on Linux.

Finally, you ask me to "CALM DOWN"... I'm not nervous nor irritated, as you seem to be (you are the one using uppercase, after all). I entered that argument in the hopes of having a enlightening conversation, but you don't seem amenable to that: you sound more like someone that's after winning an argument at any cost.

So, as I seem to have pointed all the falsehoods you posted and therefore protected the unaware of being misled by them, and also as this is producing way more heat than light, I'm outta here. Have a good day.

May 19, 2013

Press question mark to see available shortcut keys