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from the bazaar?-what-bazaar?-this-is-my-cathedral dept.
In the release notes for RedHat Enterprise Linux 7.4 we can see the following:
The Btrfs file system has been in Technology Preview state since the initial release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Red Hat will not be moving Btrfs to a fully supported feature and it will be removed in a future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The Btrfs file system did receive numerous updates from the upstream in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 and will remain available in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 series. However, this is the last planned update to this feature.
Red Hat will continue to invest in future technologies to address the use cases of our customers, specifically those related to snapshots, compression, NVRAM, and ease of use. We encourage feedback through your Red Hat representative on features and requirements you have for file systems and storage technology.
Btrfs, originally developed by Oracle and now also by SUSE and others, seems to have lost Red Hat as supporter. So what is ahead? RH isn't very clear. ZFS had license issues since day one, and is currently under Oracle umbrella, making a change near impossible. Does this mean improving XFS? Some other FS to be announce soon? Will Red Hat push its weight around like in other cases? Will other distros hold their ground or bow? Unix wars all over again, this time in Linux and FOSS land.
Maybe time to update it to Corporate Open Source Software, COSS, you can look but forget about having a voice among the big guys. The bazaar is dead, long live the cathedral. Or time to fork them off.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by sjames on Wednesday August 02 2017, @05:29PM (9 children)
It's not really surprising that BTRFS isn't as fast as XFS (SGI's filesystem back in the '90s when file I/O was barely fast enough for video) or even ext4 since neither have to do COW to support an advanced feature set.
ZFS and BTRFS are the most interesting next filesystems on offer. ZFS disqualifies itself by not having a compatible license and so requires a number of workarounds. While that may be OK for some users who want ZFS on a data volume, it simply won't do as a default root filesystem.
That leaves BTRFS. It actually works quite well as long as you avoid raid5/6. In some ways it is actually superior to ZFS. For example, it's handling of raid1. While ZFS really wants devices kept in pairs, BTRFS doesn't care about that, it just makes sure there are 2 copies of everything and they are on different devices. Add or remove devices as necessary. BTRFS doesn't insist on snapshots being special things that aren't cloned filesystems. ZFS can have better performance, but only if you throw a metric assload of memory at it.
Really, I think it's time to declare RH to be not actually Linux and leave them to disappear up their own backsides. They can take systemd and freedesktop with them.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday August 02 2017, @06:13PM
I think you are on to something..
Always experienced them as something odd in practical interactions. Linux way, BSD way... and the RedHat not anything else way.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 02 2017, @07:03PM (3 children)
Really, I think it's time to declare RH to be not actually Linux and leave them to disappear up their own backsides. They can take systemd and freedesktop with them.
If you're going to do that, then we need a good replacement for systemd (and no, the old sysvinit isn't a good replacement), just like a Chevy Corvair (after the fix) is not a good replacement for any modern vehicle).
However, if you can get Red Hat to keep Gnome3 to themselves, I'm in hearty agreement.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @07:54PM (1 child)
They're are many alternative init systems. Many /most of the good ones also handle process management... If you think the choice is systemd or medieval bs, you're driving the koolaid.
(Score: 3, Touché) by kazzie on Thursday August 03 2017, @10:08AM
Don't drink and drive!
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday August 03 2017, @12:31AM
There are many to choose from. Most don't try to wedge themselves into the system like systemd does.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pendorbound on Wednesday August 02 2017, @07:04PM (1 child)
Root on ZFS is extremely do-able. It's easier if you have a /boot partition on something like ext2, but recent GRUB can read your kernel and initrd directly from a zfs /boot or single root containing /boot.
You need an initrd with the ZFS module in it, but that's really the only requirement different from using an in-tree driver for root. The distro-level support scripts for it are quite solid. There's no licensing issue with using it in initrd in this fashion.
I've been using root on ZFS with Gentoo for about 8 years now. Initially I used ext2 for /boot. I moved to some custom patched versions of GRUB, and now using generally available GRUB with no more separate /boot.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday August 04 2017, @12:09AM
Good to know! :-)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday August 02 2017, @08:39PM (1 child)
Not bad, but a unix-like might be an even better phrase. And FreeBSD is freaking awesome and works great. No licensing problems, "just works". Has a sane and easy/fast to debug init system, totally non-windows/redhat-alike in general.
Don't dedupe which is cool but both not terribly useful and eats memory, or if you're spending an inordinate amount of money on drive space, budget perhaps $100 of ram for every $1000 of spinning rust. If you're building SSD and you have enough storage for a "normal" amount of ram to be a problem, then you must have a very large budget indeed and a couple gigs here and there will be OK.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday August 02 2017, @09:48PM
Perhaps so. No slight to FreeBSD intended.