On 24/04/2013 10:27, Ciprian Dorin Craciun wrote: > I stay away for Btrfs for now. And to be frank I don't quite like > Btrfs's, and ZFS's for that matter, approach of throwing together all > the layers, from the file-system, to the RAID, to the block > management, etc. I find the layered approach more appealing --- as in > if something goes wrong you can poke around --- of having completely > separated block device management (LVM), RAID (MD), and file-system.
For me, this is the whole attraction of ZFS and btrfs. I've just had to deal with 7 storage layers for so long I am now tired of it. I completely understand why LVM is designed the way it is - a PV, VG and LV are three distinct things handled differently and the code is compartmentalized out to reflect that. What I am so tired of is exposing that complexity in the interface so I have to be aware of it all the time. And partitions - don't get me started on that. A classic disk partition is something Bill Gates made popular for DOS and it should have died a long long time ago. Why the blazes do we STILL have this concept of a partition table, physical partitions, extended partitions..... grrrrr. Here's what I want from storage systems: I chuck a bunch of disks into a pool and inform the system how they must be used - maybe I want a certain RAID level, maybe the very fast SSD is reserved for a specific purpose. Then I want to tell the system how much storage I want for what purpose. If Joe Blow is to get 20G of storage for his ~, I want to tell the system there is a thing called joeb and it has a hard quota of 20G. The software must then go and do all the magic, because I am tired of doing the magic myself. ZFS is almost a sysadmin's wet dream come true - there's is no such thing as a "filesystem" as such, there are only chunks of storage with a purpose and characteristics. The concept of partitions goes away, there are only block devices. A volume is sort of a cross between a filesystem and a directory with the benefits of each (and few of the downsides). I suppose the main attraction can be summed up thusly: ZFS lets me stop being the human in a place where a computer belongs :-) -- Alan McKinnon [email protected]
