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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: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday August 02 2017, @06:58PM (1 child)
Not even slightly. Btrfs design started in 2007, and was first shipped in 2009, ZFS shipped in 2005. Many people were using ZFS in production when Btrfs was still a design doc and some proof of concept code. ZFS was ported to FreeBSD in 2007 and shipped in FreeBSD 7.0 and was pretty stable in FreeBSD 8 (2010). ZFS was ported to Linux as a proof-of-concept in 2008 and vaguely usable in 2011.
Btrfs was originally started by Oracle because they couldn't use ZFS with Linux because of the GPL and they wanted something equivalent. When Oracle bought Sun, they largely stopped caring about Btrfs. RedHat picked up some of the developers, but it never got the amount of testing required for a production filesystem.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by tekk on Thursday August 03 2017, @03:30AM
Sorry, that's not what I meant by in development longer. I mean that ZFS was shipping, as I understand it more or less as ZFS is today, 4 years after its inception (2001). It took btrfs 7 years just to decide what its on-disk format should be permanently with zfs to draw inspiration from.