Re: BTRFS in 2012?

On Jan 22, 2012, at 1:43 PM, Per Øyvind Karlsen wrote:

> Den 18:23 22. januar 2012 skrev Jeffrey Johnson <[email protected]> følgende:
>> 
>> On Jan 22, 2012, at 11:41 AM, Jeffrey Johnson wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> Is there interest in hugetlfs in 2012?
>>> 
>>> More directly
>>>       How much specific interest is there in "cloud" functionality in 2012?
>>> 
>>> Mandriva has traditionally been a "desktop linux" with a KDE speciality
>>> niche and a lot of attention to "polish" detail to increase usability.
>>> 
>> 
>> Another aside related to file systems and Mandriva:
>> 
>> 1) 1K fragments on ext* file systems
>> 
>>        In an attempt to maximize the no. of blocks available
>>        on user disk storage, Mandriva has traditionally used
>>        a non-default and smallest possible fragment size.
> This isn't correct, the issue you refer to was due to a bug in the installer
> several years ago (which again triggered the kernel bug).

There are several issues here, not just whatever was intended
way back when. The issue has again been reported by Felix
Miata @bugzilla.redhat.com and the Mandriva "bug" was
used as "support" for the argument.

But apologies for mis-guessing whatever the original intent was: I wasn't there
(but have spent days and weeks attempting reproducers every time
the RPM "bug" (sic) re-appears and it looks like there is yet more efforts looming).

> Also using such a small block size has serious performance drawbacks
> which would make it insane to use it as a default.
> 

One of the issues on flash performance with small block size.

(again off topic and unrelated to BTRFS and perhaps unrelated to linux)

ZFS has a huge 5+ year head start on BTRFS in terms of deployment
and stability testing that is still preventing common usage.

This is the nature of filesystems: it takes years to deploy successfully.

ZFS has been blocked for adoption because of licensing issues
related to GPLv2. The licensing issue (afaik) has a loophole
that permits ZFS to be installed if built on the end-user system,
but the binaries cannot be distributed by a linux vendor.

IANAL and all the usual disclaimers.

But there is an engineering solution to target the loophole
in the licensing that might permit ZFS to be added as a
"feature" in 2012.

Yes I'm saying dkms (or equivalent) and EULA in the installer
and a build tool that addresses the licensing obstacles to
using ZFS on Linux.

	Any interest in ZFS in 2012?

+1 from me (but I fully expect to be outvoted by GPL fanatics: oh well)

73 de Jeff
> --
> Regards,
> Per Øyvind