Btrfs merged for 2.6.29

Btrfs merged for 2.6.29

Posted Jan 10, 2009 11:48 UTC (Sat) by Duncan (guest, #6647)
In reply to: Btrfs merged for 2.6.29 by drag
Parent article: Btrfs merged for 2.6.29

So they took the special-FS-for-our-database approach before and have decided to abandon it for mainstream incorporation. The exact reasons I don't know...

One likely reason is that they've seen the "many eyes and many platforms" effect in action.

Consider any of the hardware RAID vendors out there, for instance, and the fact that such authorities as O'Reilly's RAID book consider the kernel's md/RAID a better choice in many cases, because of the degree to which it has been debugged and optimized due to the vast number of folks using it in all /sorts/ of strange corner-cases on all manner of hardware -- it has had FAR FAR more testing on FAR FAR more exotic hardware in FAR FAR more strange and exotic use cases than any proprietary hardware RAID vendor could ever even dream about.

There's simply no replacing that. It thus stands to reason that if they want the absolute best, most stable foundation they could possibly come up with for data storage and access, there's simply no possible substitute for mainline Linux code. It'll be ported to all manner of different hardware platforms and instituted in all sorts of different corner-cases besides the single-use Oracle DB, thus exposing all sorts of exotic bugs, now, while still under development, that would otherwise not appear until years later, after the API and on-hardware format would have long since hardened, making it difficult or impossible to fix as effectively as they'll be able to do now, while it's still under development. It's that sort of QA they're now going to get for free, that it's simply impossible to buy, no matter how many millions of dollars they throw at testing.

If btrfs ever gets anything even close to as popular as it looks like it could, given that currently it's /the/ solution given as the successor to ext2/3/4, with all sorts of people running it as their general purpose fs at virtually all levels, well, you give me a plausible scenario under which Oracle could possibly get a better, more well tested on every conceivable computing device under the sun, storage foundation. Sure, it'll take a few years to get there, but there's simply no plausibly better alternative. All the while, they get loads of community goodwill for sponsoring the thing, while actually putting way less into development than if they were trying to keep it proprietary. They're not Sun, and this isn't zfs (tho zfs is open, just, apparently deliberately, not Linux/GPL license compatible).

Meanwhile, while we're on the subject, anybody (presumably kernel folks) have any idea to what degree the hardware RAID folks may now be embedding Linux kernel md/RAID for their hardware RAID? One would think that'd be the way to go there, as well, for much the same reason. I know some of the NAS hardware is Linux based and can run OpenWRT, for instance, but I have no idea how widespread it is, or whether hardware RAID cards, etc, have anything like a similar level of embedded Linux penetration.

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