On 7/24/13 3:41 AM, Andrew Wafaa wrote:
On 23-07-2013 15:33, Jeff Mahoney wrote:
Hi all -
In another thread, someone posted about wanting an updated btrfsprogs (it's coming, as soon as I finish writing this email). He mentioned it in terms of wanting to try out the RAID5 code.
One of the things that's made it possible for SUSE to support btrfs in our enterprise products is often overlooked in media reports and casual analysis: We limit the feature set we support. In SLE11 SP3, we actively limit the feature set without a mount option enabling access to those features. We don't enable compression or multi-volume file systems.
So, the question is: Is this something we should consider for openSUSE as well? The goal isn't to ever deny users access to the available features or to force them to rebuild the kernel to enable them, but to shield unsuspecting users from features that may not be fully baked yet. For example, the RAID5 code in particular is still fairly fragile.
-Jeff
Hi Jeff,
I personally think we should have all the options available, but I do realise that this could be a major headache for all involved. If there was a way to have the bleeding edge features available for those that are more prepared to cut themselves, yet hidden from those that don't want the bloodshed then great.
Failing having the happy medium, maybe the SLE team could advise on what features they think would make sense should they be stable enough and then we could test it to see how stable things really are. If things don't get tested and bugs reported it will never improve, so we almost need to implement the new features to get a better product.
Yep. Absolutely. Bug reports are what drives product quality. The problem is that when we know certain features need a little more time to stabilize and that distinction isn't made clear to users who'd rather not be the ones filing the bug reports. To be clear, we're talking about disabling some of btrfs's most publicized features: compression, multivolume support, etc, so users may think that they're safe to use everywhere. I don't want to take the choice away from anyone. I just want to make it clear that some features are considered stable and others aren't. If you are an advanced user, you can drop the 'options btrfs allow_unsupported=1' (or whatever we want to name it) line into /etc/modprobe.d and you have the full set of features available to you. We *do* want those bug reports, but it's good to set parameters for what we consider a bug fix for an unstable feature and what we consider a bug fix for something that should be rock solid. -Jeff -- Jeff Mahoney SUSE Labs