Hello all, On 2013-09-04 T 19:48 -0400 Jeff Mahoney wrote:
On 9/4/13 2:22 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
On Wed, 04 Sep 2013 12:04:58 -0400, Jeff Mahoney wrote:
I know people don't really want to compare SLES with openSUSE, but here's a case in which the story matters. We've been offering official support for btrfs since SLE11 SP2. SP3 was released a few months ago. Many people thought we were insane to do so because OMG BTRFS IS STILL EXPERIMENTAL, but we've crafted a file system implementation that *is* supportable. Between limiting the feature set for which we offer support and our kernel teams aggressively identifying and backporting fixes that may not have been pulled into the mainline kernel yet (more a factor of the maintainers being busy than the patches not being fully baked), we've created a pretty solid file system implementation.
Given that the work for btrfs in SLE and openSUSE is being handled largely by the same people, I think it makes sense to make the comparison.
SLE doesn't yet default to btrfs, though, does it?
SLE11 defaults to ext3 and we don't change the default in a service pack. I can't comment on what the default in SLE12 will be. I'll refer questions about that to our product manager for SLES, Matthias Eckermann. It should be apparent that SUSE is invested in the success of btrfs, though.
Indeed, the decision to focus on btrfs has been made more than three years ago. The primary driver for this was the Copy on Write functionality, and the benefits you can get out of this for the operating system: snapshots for package installation and administrative changes. Many years ago I visited a datacenter in the financial sector in Germany, and they had implemented a mechanism to prevent "surprises" due to operating system updates. Basically they had multiple LVM-LVs for "/" and "/boot" and rsync-ed the currently active volumes before updating the kernel and other critical parts, thus they always had a "well known state". I know that many people and companies have implemented this the one or the other way. With btrfs, snapshots, zypper integration, and the ability to boot off btrfs snapshots (not yet, but soon, hopefully), this shall be available for everybody, in a consistent and integrated way -- and without extra effort on the user's side. Accordingly, the plan is indeed to make btrfs the default filesystem for the operating system in SUSE Linux Enterprise 12. <advertisement> A discussion about this will also be part of my presentation at this year's LinuxCon/US, see: http://linuxconcloudopenna2013.sched.org/event/0e707c607eb3fd1cb06664517724e... </advertisement> so long - MgE, proudly using btrfs as root and home. -- Matthias G. Eckermann Senior Product Manager SUSE® Linux Enterprise SUSE LINUX Products GmbH Maxfeldstraße 5 90409 Nürnberg Germany GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg)