[ale] BTRFS - used it?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Wed, 5 Aug 2009, David W. Millians wrote:
> I keep on rebuilding my new home server as I've tried different ideas and
> learned new things, and have just about settled on how it's going to work
> and what it's to do.
>
> To that end, I'm going to be chaining together multiple drives on the
> machine, since it's going to serve all my music and video. I came very
> close to doing something BSdish simply because ZFS looks so nifty. Rather
> than leave my beloved Debian - although I hear they're doing BSD soon -
> I'm interested in BTRFS instead.
>
> Is this another one of those cases, like Debian testing, where the
> 'instability' is highly exaggerated? I'm not going to be thrashing a drive
> with this, just storing and serving with it.
>
> I do realize I'll have to load a custom kernel, of course. I'm just more
> interested in the real-world stability of BTRFS.

I haven't tried it _recently_, but as of not terribly long ago, Linus is 
using btrfs on at least one system as a root fs.

I've been thinking about adding a logical volume to house a btrfs 
filesystem to test it out, but I'm not ready to put production data on it. 
The on-disk format still is able to change between releases.  From the 
btrfs Web site:

   Btrfs is under heavy development, and is not suitable for any uses other
   than benchmarking and review. The Btrfs disk format is not yet
   finalized, but it will only be changed if a critical bug is found
   and no workarounds are possible.

The most recent format (e.g., that which is in the kernel that will be 
v2.6.31) has had one such on-disk format change.  Kernels 2.6.29 and 
2.6.30 speak the same version, and kernels prior to 2.6.29, it is 
absolutely unstable and not usable (that would be when I last attempted to 
use it; I couldn't get it to work at all).

 	--- Mike