A brief history of btrfs
by Michael Hay on August 2, 2009
Pronounced “butter-f-s” as many are aware is the heir apparent to the extX series of
file systems in the Linux ecosystem. There is a really great article over at LWN.net on the history of btrfs. Note that I’ve briefly mentioned brtfs before in the context of comparison to xfs. I think that the the more interesting points in the article are:
- There is the hint that btrfs is more advanced than zfs, and since the author has been involved in the development zfs her perspective on comparing the two is interesting.
- Also of course btrfs is extent based which brings back my point that perhaps xfs was something that was already well down the path of being ultra-modern, but back in the day. (Hey it seems like sgi was similar to dec in so many ways. That out innovated the competition technically, but failed to ramp the necessary customer adoption to stay alive and healthy.)
Again anyone have any comparison/comments on the state of xfs and btrfs?
P.S. Besides I get to use tux with claws.
Comments (5 )
Vinod Subramaniam on 03 Aug 2009 at 5:47 am
Michael
Here’s a excellent benchmark from Usenix published by Samsung.
As you may already know btrfs is optimized for SSD and one can turn this on using the -o ssd option with mount.
http://www.usenix.org/event/lsf08/tech/shin_SSD.pdf
– Vinod
Michael Hay on 04 Aug 2009 at 2:11 am
Vinod, I continue to be impressed by btrfs and I’m really wondering not if the technology will make it, but what will Oracle/Sun do with it versus ZFS. I’ll take a look at the paper you recommended for review. Also yes I’m aware of the mount options for btrfs with respect to SSD.
Michael Hay on 05 Aug 2009 at 4:15 am
Vinod, have you read the following tutorial http://www.howtoforge.com/boot-on-btrfs-with-debian about making your boot partition btrfs? I don’t have a spare machine available, but I might try a VM appliance to see what I can do.
Vinod Subramaniam on 05 Aug 2009 at 10:37 am
Michael
I’m actually trying to boot Gentoo 2.6.30 on btrfs on Sun E10k in the lab. Will post the results online when am done.
– Vinod
Michael Hay on 05 Aug 2009 at 11:32 am
Vinod, I’d love to see the results.
