No Btrfs by default in Fedora 16

Posted Aug 11, 2011 12:03 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
In reply to: No Btrfs by default in Fedora 16 by cmccabe
Parent article: No Btrfs by default in Fedora 16

Snapshots have the intriguing advantage that they an give you "this instant in time" file system state to back up, instead of "some random jumble of inconsistent state during whatever time the backup took to run". Combine that with FS-level transactions and you don't need to dump your database contents any more. Win.

They also have the less-than-intriguing disadvantage that writing to the middle of a file can result in running out of disk space. Databases typically don't cope with that at all well. (Running out while extending a file, OTOH, is a well-understood problem.)

No Btrfs by default in Fedora 16

Posted Aug 11, 2011 14:30 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Writing to the middle of a file always *could* lead to running out of disk space (think sparse files), and any program which can't handle it on files that others might touch is broken. (This means databases are safe: anyone who makes a DB file sparse without the RDBMS knowing about it is playing with fire.)