Re: [gentoo-user] Re: File system testing

["J. Roeleveld" <joost@antarean.org>]

On Friday, September 19, 2014 10:56:59 AM Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 9:41 AM, James <wireless@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> > I think btrfs has tremendous potential. I tried ZFS a few times,
> > but the installs are not part of gentoo, so they got borked
> > uEFI, grubs to uuids, etc etc also were in the mix. That was almost
> > a year ago. For what ever reason the clustering folks I have
> > read and communicated with are using ext4, xfs and btrfs. Prolly
> > mostly because those are mostly used in their (systemd) inspired)
> > distros....?
> 
> I do think that btrfs in the long-term is more likely to be mainstream
> on linux, but I wouldn't be surprised if getting zfs working on Gentoo
> is much easier now.  Richard Yao is both a Gentoo dev and significant
> zfs on linux contributor, so I suspect he is doing much of the latter
> on the former.

Don't have the link handy, but there is an howto about it that, when followed, 
will give a ZFS pool running on Gentoo in a very short time. (emerge zfs is 
the longest part of the whole thing)
Not even needed to reboot.

> > Yep. the license issue with ZFS is a real killer for me. Besides,
> > as an old state-machine, C hack, anything with B-tree is fabulous.
> > Prejudices? Yep, but here, I'm sticking with my gut. Multi port
> > ram can do mavelous things with Btree data structures. The
> > rest will become available/stable. Simply, I just trust btrfs, in
> > my gut.
> 
> I don't know enough about zfs to compare them, but the design of btrfs
> has a certain amount of beauty/symmetry/etc to it IMHO.  I only have
> studied it enough to be dangerous and give some intro talks to my LUG,
> but just about everything is stored in b-trees, the design allows both
> fixed and non-fixed length nodes within the trees, and just about
> everything about the filesystem is dynamic other than the superblocks,
> which do little more than ID the filesystem and point to the current
> tree roots.  The important stuff is all replicated and versioned.
> 
> I wouldn't be surprised if it shared many of these design features
> with other modern filesystems, and I do not profess to be an expert on
> modern filesystem design, so I won't make any claims about btrfs being
> better/worse than other filesystems in this regard.  However, I would
> say that anybody interested in data structures would do well to study
> it.

I like the idea of both and hope BTRFS will also come with the raid-6-like 
features and good support for larger drive counts (I've got 16 available for 
the filestorage) to make it, for me, a viable alternative to ZFS.

--
Joost