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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 rleigh on Wednesday August 02 2017, @07:49PM
I would not count it as a "greatest achievement". Despite all the effort which went into it, they failed to do the necessary up-front design work, and then failed to create a robust implementation. It's been a buggy mess since the start, and despite lots of work since then, it's still a mess. Lots of effort on the codebase can't work around fundamental design flaws baked into the on-disc format.
They wanted to create something better than ZFS. But when it came to the design, they ignored much of the subtle details of ZFS and failed to appreciate the implications. This is why the fsync performance of Btrfs is abysmal, likewise snapshot performance and deletion, but it's almost negligable with ZFS. Why? Because the ZFS design was carefully considered and this was ignored by the Btrfs developers.
Btrfs is a poster child for hubris. Despite all the hype, and the vast number of man hours which went into it, it's still very immature. It doesn't hold a candle to ZFS from a decade ago, let alone today, and that was entirely self-inflicted by rushing to write code before working on the design. And then freezing the on-disc format when it was known to be defective in multiple ways, thereby preventing whole swathes of problems from ever being fixed.