Catching up on Btrfs
Btrfs is a next generation file system for Linux which has features similar to those of ZFS, Sun Microsystem’s new filesystem. Here is a nice post describing some of the benefits of ZFS. Apple seems to be pushing ZFS as it will be included on Snow Leopard (but won’t replace HFS).
I’ve been following btrfs for a couple of months now and here is what I’ve found.
You can learn about why ZFS cannot be included in the Linux Kernel by reading Linus’ Comments on ZFS 1. There is a zfs-fuse project (this allows fuse to be run in “user space” so that it is kept out of the Kernel). However, who wants their file systems bolted on like this when we could have something built in by default with better performance?2
The best place for general information about btrfs is the btrfs wiki site.
Here is a general but somewhat technical overview of btrfs in slides from Oracle. It’s sponsored by Oracle and is partially hosted on their site.
If you really want to know what’s going on you can check out the mailing list. These discussions are usually in-depth discussions of specific patches, but it’s nice to see that people are coding.
Also from what I can gather, it actually currently works (of course not recommended for production use… blah, blah, blah). And what a nice surprise, it crept into the Intrepid Ibex universe repository which means I’ll be taking it for a spin in a bit.
Performance benchmarks look good for a file system with so many new features and development on this project seems to be going very quickly. I’m looking forward to better data storage in Linux.
Footnotes
1 And here is Sun CEO, Jonathan Schwartz’s reply
2 However, ZFS on Fuse Creator claims that it it possible that performance issues will be minor in this post even though the performance is a problem now.