A better btrfs [LWN.net]

A better btrfs

Posted Jan 17, 2008 12:54 UTC (Thu) by sveinrn (subscriber, #2827)
In reply to: A better btrfs by Klavs
Parent article: A better btrfs

To me it seems to solve all the stupid problems with md/lvm/ext3. Just as I am writing this,
the users of my system are waiting for a "resize2fs" to complete. With file systems at several
TB on a rather slow MSA 1500 this can take hours. SLES10 has a command for doing the resize
online, but every time I try, it complaints about an inode or data block in the wrong location
or something like that. (I have not tried lately, so I don't remember the exact error
message.) 

Being able to create a mirror of something that is not on an MD-device sounds great,
especially with lvm where a filesystem spans multiple volumes and is mixed up with lots of
other filesystems that don't need mirroring. pvmove offers some of the functionality, but has
caused some horrible system crashes, and I'm only allowed to use it during the night after the
backup has completed. 

One of the reasons I was allowed to replace HPUX as our NFS-server was that I told management
that Linux was at least equally flexible... :(

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A better btrfs

Posted Jan 17, 2008 13:07 UTC (Thu) by sveinrn (subscriber, #2827) [Link]

OK, I see that in SLES10 there is a command called lvconvert which creates mirrors. I have not
needed the functionality after we upgraded from SLES9...

But still, the general feeling is that Linux lags several years behind other operating systems
when it comes to handling of large filesystems.