[ale] BTRFS - used it?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Wed, 5 Aug 2009, Ed Cashin wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 1:12 PM, David W. Millians<millia at panix.com> wrote:
> ...
>> 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 don't think that the 'instability' is highly exaggerated in this case.
> The reason is that I was listening to a recent (the latest?) Linux
> Kernel Mailing List Podcast episode from Jon Masters, and he
> mentioned that Chris Mason had pushed a bunch of last minute
> patches for btrfs into a new Linux kernel.  Now normally, that would
> not be OK, since at the last minute only bugfixes are supposed to
> be going in, but in this case Jon said they'd probably be accepted.
>
> The reason is that btrfs is widely considered to be highly developmental
> (I for get the exact wording.) as opposed to stable.  What that means
> to me is that the folks who could be making btrfs relatively more stable
> are instead concentrating on streamlining the development effort.
>
> I don't have any information besides that, though, or any experience
> with btrfs.  If you try it, please let us know what you find out.

This post from LWN (on July 22) may be useful:

   http://lwn.net/Articles/342892/

It would _appear_ that if you're running a recent (2.6.30 or 2.6.31 
prerelease) kernel, that it should be suitable for use in-home, but not if 
you're a kernel developer, as Linus found out the hard way:

   http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org/msg02500.html

 	--- Mike