On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 8:59 PM, Jeff Mahoney <jeffm@suse.com> wrote:
On 9/3/13 7:00 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
On Tue, 03 Sep 2013 19:55:49 -0300, Claudio Freire wrote:
Also, consider the target audience of default filesystems.
These aren't for the power users, which will consciously pick the filesystem they like best. Default filesystems are for the granny and the newbie, those that cannot and will not fix low-level filesystem issues.
I haven't used BtrFS recently, but unless it's granny-proof, I'd think twice before making it default.
+1. Changing the default to btrfs is going to increase the number of people having problems posting in the forums. It still seems to be considered "unstable" or "experimental", and if so, shouldn't be selected as the default.
Well that's the main thrust behind the "allow unsupported" module option. We have the feature set that we've evaluated to be mature and that's what we allow by default.
When I cast a wide net across forums and mailing lists last month asking for user experiences, I got a lot of uninformed opinion and very little concrete data. Most of the negative data was in the area of snapper being too aggressive in creating snapshots and not aggressive enough in cleaning them up. There was some negative opinion WRT the file system itself, but most of it was in the realm of "I heard..." or "I don't trust it" based on too much hearsay and too little experience. It's that kind of rumor-response that is unhelpful in making decisions or improving the pain points with the file system. There were a few reports of people having troubles with the file system itself, but they tended to be with compression or RAID enabled -- the features that we don't entirely trust yet and want to disable so the casual user doesn't become an unwitting beta tester.
Well, while I have no concrete data, I do have an idea of how granny-type users treat their systems. One of the most important things to test in BtrFS before considering it default-able, is its crash resilience. If it can withstand power outages (which users will consciously induce and abuse, like my dad, who thought the quickest way to turn off his computer was holding the power button for 5 seconds until I screamed at him), then that's certainly a good sign. If it can't, not. I'm sure there's ways to test this with OpenQA too - just launch a VM, make it work intensively on disk, stop it forcefully without giving it a chance to whatever, and re-launch. See what happens. Is this doable with OpenQA? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org