SUSE reaffirms support for Btrfs
SUSE reaffirms support for Btrfs
Posted Aug 24, 2017 23:10 UTC (Thu) by ttelford (guest, #44176)In reply to: SUSE reaffirms support for Btrfs by drag
Parent article: SUSE reaffirms support for Btrfs
Evidence is stacking up that BTRFS is broken unless they are willing to make significant changes to the on-disk format, which would essentially necessitate a 'btrfsv2' since that is a dramatic thing. Hopefully this is not the case, but time will tell.
I definitely don't know enough to say whether the on-disk format is broken, but there are other issues.
Software RAID with BTRFS was known to be broken - RAID 5/6 was supposedly re-introduced with kernel 4.12. It'll take a lot more than an announcement that they fixed it to convince me btrfs won't eat my disks this time around.
Running out of space on BTRFS is frequently fatal - doubly so if you don't recognize that you've run out of space before trying something else.
It's very non-obvious when you've run out of space with BTRFS - I have yet to see the typical "filesystem out of space" errors, and other programs are similarly confused - instead of being told the filesystem is out of space, programs receive no warning at all, instead simply waiting until there's a write timeout.
I've spent a few long days & nights recovering a btrfs filesystem that went south for no apparent reason (failure was not due to the usual suspects: RAID 5/6, a power failure, running out of space, and so on). A sane person would have just created a new filesystem and restored from backup, but I decided I wanted to learn to recover BTRFS. The good news is that there were viable snapshots (yay COW!), and I was actually able to recover all of the data from the snapshot, and its checksums were valid. (The filesystem was still horked, of course -- I had to copy the data to a working filesystem, and then delete & re-create the horked btrfs)
I've been more than a little forgiving of BTRFS, and have been testing and using it for years at this point. BTRFS has promise, I want it to succeed... but it's dissapointed me enough that I have no reservations saying BTRFS should only be used with great caution
For anything mission-critical, I use ZFS (and give the system gobs of RAM).