[Dclug] Slides up, was Re: DCLUG meeting reminder: tonight, Wed, Aug 19, 7pm: BTRFS

[Przemek Klosowski]

   A minor request though:  On slide 8, one of the items reads "XFS from
   SGI, which is on the ropes."  Could you elaborate a bit on this?  Do
   you mean that SGI is "on the ropes" (which is not news), or XFS is "on
   the ropes" (which is news).  :)

I hope you are not going to base your strategic filesystem deployment
decisions on jokes from my presentation :) 

I meant to say that SGI was in a tight spot, even back in 2007 when
XFS was certainly one of the best filesystems around. Two years later,
with SGI bought by Rackable, in all seriousness, I would worry about
XFS possibly succumbing to bit rot.  It doesn't _have_ to happen, and
XFS surely works well today, but if it is not developed actively, I
could see it having trouble keeping up with evolving kernel
infrastructue (VFS and whatnot).

BTW, it's the same reason why in my personal opinion BTRFS will
fare better than ZFS, even if today it is quite raw(*): there are
more people banging on it. Self-fullfilling hypothesis, I know.


(*) I just played with it a little bit using loop mounts;

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/b0 bs=1G count=1
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/b1 bs=1G count=1
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/b2 bs=1G count=1
mkfs.btrfs /tmp/b2 /tmp/b1 /tmp/b0
losetup /dev/loop0 /tmp/b0
losetup /dev/loop1 /tmp/b1
losetup /dev/loop2 /tmp/b2
mount /dev/loop0 /mnt

but I couldn't figure out how to remove one of the volumes (btrfs-vol
-r /tmp/b0 shouldhave worked), and snapshots didn't work either
(btrfsctl -s snap /mnt)