Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
SUSE has decided to let the world know it has no plans to step away from the btrfs filesystem, and plans to make it even better.
The company's public display of affection comes after Red Hat decided not to fully support the filesystem in its own Linux.
Losing a place in one of the big three Linux distros isn't a good look for any package even if, as was the case with this decision, Red Hat was never a big contributor or fan of btrfs.
[Matthias G. Eckermann] also hinted at some future directions for the filesystem. "We just start to see the opportunities from subvolume quotas when managing Quality of Service on the storage level" he writes, adding "Compression (already there) combined with Encryption (future) makes btrfs an interesting choice for embedded systems and IoT, as may the full use of send-receive for managing system patches and updates to (Linux based) 'firmware'." ®
Mmmmmm... butter-fs
Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/25/suse_btrfs_defence/
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday August 28 2017, @08:15PM
On the other hand, Debian stable isn't known for moving at breakneck speed either but it supports BTRFS just fine.
RH's continuing dedication to xfs is a bit puzzling as well. xfs made sense in the '90s on IRIX back when SGI was doing heavy video work on hardware where disk I/O was barely up to the task. In that environment, software willing to go out of it's way to work with the FS to maximize I/O could see substantial performance gains. None of that really matters much now, especially since the most interesting features had a hard requirement on specialized hardware that doesn't exist on most servers today. Further, even with the special hardware, the features were not ported to the Linux implementation anyway.
COW really looks like the future in file systems. It's early(-ish) days for BTRFS, but it really is a credible choice these days as long as you stay away from raid > 1 and according to some, zlib compression (lzo is fine). I could understand if RH wanted to make a play with ZFS instead of BTRFS, but abandoning all of it to keep pushing XFS makes no sense.