btrfsck coming soon!

[ghmitch]

I just read on a mailing list post that Oracle Linux is planning to make btrfs default for their next release. This surprises me in that if true it would indicate a tremendous amount of confidence in btrfs which is still nowhere near stable. But this was in a post attributed to Chris Mason and in it Mason puts a huge urgency on getting btrfsck out the door as that is what seemingly is holding up the process toward stability at this point. It looks like Oracle is really counting on exploiting btrfs to the fullest. Only two next gen filesystems exist at this point and Oracle owns both of them. MS is getting left in the dust when it comes to filesystems.

I just initiated a test run with btrfs today. What I am doing for this test run is to create a /usr/lib filesystem on a pair of drives configured to btrfs RAID 1. I am then mounting that at boot over the top of the existing /usr filesystem. The result is that if the new btrfs filesystem were to fail to mount, the underlying ext4 /usr filesystem which includes /usr/lib would pick up the slack and keep the system operational. And if anything goes wrong with the btrfs filesystem, all I have to do is unmount it and edit /etc/fstab to re-expose the old ext4 /usr/lib. Working very slick so far.

Very interesting that diskdrake cannot even see the btrfs filesystem on the drives. It shows the drives as being empty. But since btrfs does not require drive partitioning, that might pose a problem for diskdrake.

[ghmitch]

Well, it appears the date is February 14th:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA0ODU

From then it will still take time to drift out through the distros of course.

[JoesCat]

Somewhat interesting to know.
I think I saw some initial peeks at btrfsck when Mandriva was building Alpha or Beta 2011 for testing. It was a bit of a problem then since we were more used to using something like dd to copy the image to a USB stick for initial testing, but some of us had trouble getting those to work (if you lacked a DVD drive on the test computer).