BTRFS deprecated on Red Hat Enterprise 7

[Arwen]

This reflink thing has been in Linux for several years, but few file systems implement it. BTRFS was going to be one of them;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs#Cloning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs#Cloning

Someone actually put in a bug / feature request to add reflink to ZFSonLinux. I don't have the bug number handy... But just saw it in the last few days.

 

[danb35]

iX's response.

 

[Evi Vanoost]

There are many problems with BTRFS, even though the devs consider it stable or 'good enough' it still has instances where it eats your data. It's the systemd of storage, devs that think they are smarter than everyone else and the entire kitchen sink gets implemented (poorly) even though the core portions of the code haven't been finished yet.

I'm glad big companies like Red Hat and SuSE are not considering it for enterprise deployment. They should really consider packaging OpenZFS and support it as a first class storage option.

 

[danb35]

But licensing!

 

[Evi Vanoost]

Licensing doesn't prevent a distro from including ZFS in the distribution. The only thing you can't do is include CDDL portions of any program as part of the GPL kernel in a single binary blob.

The only problem is that some companies don't want to test Oracle, even though it's legal, the ensuing legal costs to defend your rights would be high and Oracle has practically unlimited money. Ubuntu however has done so for a while and Oracle hasn't sued them yet.

The same does apply to FreeNAS to an extent, even though BSD is another license, Oracle could sue iXsystems for whatever reason (patent infringement) and within a few years, they would simply buckle under the legal cost.

 

[Rattlebattle79]

Licensing doesn't prevent a distro from including ZFS in the distribution. The only thing you can't do is include CDDL portions of any program as part of the GPL kernel in a single binary blob.

The only problem is that some companies don't want to test Oracle, even though it's legal, the ensuing legal costs to defend your rights would be high and Oracle has practically unlimited money. Ubuntu however has done so for a while and Oracle hasn't sued them yet.

The same does apply to FreeNAS to an extent, even though BSD is another license, Oracle could sue iXsystems for whatever reason (patent infringement) and within a few years, they would simply buckle under the legal cost.

Well, wouldn't that be to violate the GPL license and not CDDL anyway? Oracle cannot sue anyone for violating the GPL license, I bet they would if there was even a tiny, little chance for suing Canonical for licence violation. It's Oracle, after all ;-):

 

[Ericloewe]

Yeah, I'm fairly certain (though IANAL) that the CDDL is solid, until some new, novel legal theory shows up and actually convinces a court.

 

[IceBoosteR]

On the other hand, Synology with DSM 6.1+ supports BTRFS and it works great. Under linux I tried some things and it was "okey", I would prefer ZFS here. But on the normal consumer side BTRFS on synology boxes is awesome. Just click somewhere and a complete scrub is running, snapshots are working and so on. Some year ago the only one who offers this features was openZFS.
I am sure there is a place outside of Synology for BTRFS to exist in the enterprise area.
Just my2 cents ;)

 

[Ericloewe]

That's because it's not btrfs, at least not totally. They use a different volume manager and run btrfs on top, much like you would with hardware RAID.

 

[IceBoosteR]

That's because it's not btrfs, at least not totally. They use a different volume manager and run btrfs on top, much like you would with hardware RAID.

Well thats new for me as they are always promoting this as it is "real BTRFS".
But it works great ;)

 

[Arwen]

On the other hand, Synology with DSM 6.1+ supports BTRFS and it works great. Under linux I tried some things and it was "okey", I would prefer ZFS here. But on the normal consumer side BTRFS on synology boxes is awesome. Just click somewhere and a complete scrub is running, snapshots are working and so on. Some year ago the only one who offers this features was openZFS.
I am sure there is a place outside of Synology for BTRFS to exist in the enterprise area.
Just my2 cents ;)

Well thats new for me as they are always promoting this as it is "real BTRFS".
But it works great ;)

But wait til the scrub actually finds a problem, then you'll see.

To be extremely clear, some BTRFS implementations use either external software RAID, (like MD-RAID), or hardware RAID instead of the BTRFS' RAID. Thus, zero chance of a scrub fixing anything. (Unless you add in the very new, meaning less well tested, data duplication feature. But then it's copies=2 on top of whatever RAID is below.)

So, check out HOW they implemeted the RAID protection. If it's not native BTRFS RAID-1/10, then scrubs & checksums can't fix data. (Though metadata might be duplicated...) BTRFS RAID-5/6 does not yet work. (Note I said BTRFS RAID-5/6, not MD-RAID-5/6... different animals.)