Richard Freeman <[email protected]> posted [email protected], excerpted below, on Fri, 23 Jan 2009 11:51:31 -0500:
> If you want to think really long term take a look at btrfs. I am. I'm looking at it much as I was looking at reiser4 some years ago, but it has already passed the hurdle reiser4 couldn't. As well, Chris Mason ended up the maintainer of reiserfs after Reiser/Namesys pretty much abandoned it, as well, and was the one behind adding data=ordered to it according to what I read of the changelogs, so I'm already depending on his work with reiserfs for my entire system. > It looks > like it aims to be everything that zfs is (minus the GPL-incompatible > license). As zfs hasn't been GPL compatible, I've not followed it as closely as I might have, but I'm certainly looking forward to btrfs sometime later, late this year or sometime next, my plan if things go well. > Definitely not ready for prime time, but the proposed feature > set looks better than zfs. I don't like the inability to reshape zfs - > you can add more arrays to your system, but you can't add one drive to > an existing array (online or offline). Btrfs seems to aim to be able to > do this. Again, it is completely experimental at this point - don't use > it except to try it out. It will be possible to migrate ext3/4 directly > in-place to btrfs, and even reverse the migration (minus any changes - > it essentially snapshots the existing data). The only limitation is > that if you delete files you won't get the space back until you get rid > of the ability to migrate back to ext3 (since it is a snapshot). I didn't know in-place migrating ext3/4 to btrfs was going to be possible. The big reason I've not used ext* is because I just can't see wasting all those partial blocks, tho the extents of ext4 have been tempting even without reiserfs tail packing. That tail packing is something else I'm not sure btrfs does, but even without that, given the integrated RAID- like features, I'll probably upgrade when it comes time. Shortening the recovery time as it doesn't have to rebuild the "empty data" portions of the volume will be nice. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
