Fedora 16 To Use Btrfs Filesystem By Default

dkd903 writes "According to proposals for Fedora 16, Btrfs will be the default filesystem used in that release. The proposal has been approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. In Fedora 16, the switch from EXT4 to Btrfs will be a 'simple switch' — it means that major Btrfs features such as RAID and LVM capabilities will not be forced onto users."

I wonder if they have a working fsck yet?

[Thrakkerzog]

In the long run btrfs will be good to have, especially with solid state drives gaining popularity. Even embedded devices can easily have multi-gigabyte flash chips, and btrfs would be faster and more efficient on these when compared to jffs2 and yaffs.

Re:Sources for this?

[Lunix Nutcase]

But how does that drive ad clicks for digitizor if one links to the official source? Silly you.

Re:But... btrfs isn't stable

[MrHanky]

It makes perfect sense. Btrfs won't get stable for RHEL unless it's beta tested in Fedora first.

Re:Rollback system changes

[somersault]

Snapshot takes minimal disk space compared to a backup

Use an incremental backup?

I'm not saying it wouldn't be a nice feature to have built into the OS, just that instead of hoping for such a feature in future, people can have similar functionality right now if they really want it.

Availability Notice

[mgmartin]

Quoted from man mkfs.btrfs on Fedora 15.

...Btrfs is currently under heavy development, and not suitable for any uses other than benchmarking and review.

That sure limits the uses of a default Fedora installation.

Re:Rollback system changes

[Bob Loblaw]

There was already a yum plugin for this (yum-plugin-fs-shapshot) as far back as F13 as mentioned here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Btrfs_in_Fedora_13 [fedoraproject.org]

It will do an automatic btrfs snapshot of affected filesystems before every yum transaction so that you can go back to whatever point you want. Also, since it is partition dependent, you can rollback your system partition and not undo changes you may have made to your home directories if you have those on different partitions.

btrfs is quite powerful but I have found that the user/GUI tools have not come up to speed yet. I have been using btrfs from my F15 netbook and it seems to have caused no issues so far. However, enabling transparent compression and any tweaking has entailed editing /etc/fstab (never a thing to do lightly) and command lines.

Hopefully some of the GUI disk management tools will start to make available some of the capabilities of btrfs.

Re:I wonder if they have a working fsck yet?

[maskedbishounen]

This. I run btrfs on my home file server and lost a half year of data due to a power outage corrupting the filesystem. Afterwards I was looking around for its fsck utility only to find it does not yet exist. Btrfs may be the way of the future, but as is, it's still too soon.

Re:Cool.

[jetole]

Turn your files into butter is right. Though I don't use Fedora, I was interested to look into btrfs again when I read this post on slashdot.

Much to my surprise, directly from the main btrfs wiki: "Note that Btrfs does not yet have a fsck tool that can fix errors. While Btrfs is stable on a stable machine, it is currently possible to corrupt a filesystem irrecoverably if your machine crashes or loses power on disks that don't handle flush requests correctly. This will be fixed when the fsck tool is ready."

Why would RedHat choose such a file system that does not have basic support for recovery of a file system after a system crashes? This has been an essential part of file systems since the as far back as I can remember.

Re:Cool.

[jetole]

"a very small risk"? Have you never had a system crash that you have had to reboot? Have you never had to run fsck to scan and correct a disk? Everyone else I know who uses Linux has done both multiple times. This particular "shiny new toys", as you put it, is not production ready if it does not contain fsck capabilities and according to it's authors it does not. When I say "production ready", I am not referring to whether or not it's stable enough to run a production server farm but I mean whether or not it is capable to handle a Linux desktop system that is not designated for beta testing only. I would be happy to run btrfs when everything is complete but right now the authors of btrfs say that a nessecary component for generic system failure issues is not yet complete.

Re:Cool.

[jjohnson]

You get the reliability you select. All you need to do to avoid this issue with brtfs is 1) use ext4 instead, or 2) use a hard disk that doesn't lie about whether or not it's buffering.

Fedora is not production ready even in the sense of a daily use desktop with data that can't be recovered from backup, even without this problem. It's explicitly a testbed distro, and always has been.