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The btrfs will be the next killer fs for Linux. What reiser4 promised, will be delivered by btrfs.

We only have to be patient ;-)

Regards Harry

I respectfully disagree. The btrfs feature set was carefully selected to include features that are actually useful in the real world, without all the pie-in-the-sky crap that Reiser4 promised, and without all the VFS polution that it delivered.

It is a feature set that is ambitious enough to be exciting, but not so overly-ambitious as to be unattainable in a reasonable time frame.

And unlike Hans, Chris seems like a good team player, who is interested in working *with* the greater community. And that bodes well for his exciting new filesystem.

As the ext3 vs reiser4 faked benchmark fiasco, and his general demeanor so clearly demonstrated, Hans could not be trusted, nor could he be relied upon to act with the interests of the community at heart.

I'm and ext3/4 fan. But I look forward to a usable btrfs with great anticipation.

Edited 2008-03-10 20:09 UTC

I didn't ment it on a functional level, but on a more abstract level.

But at least we agree on the fact that btrfs looks very promising :-)

btrfs looks promising to me in security aspect:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTR-80

I respectfully disagree. The btrfs feature set was carefully selected to include features that are actually useful in the real world, without all the pie-in-the-sky crap that Reiser4 promised, and without all the VFS pollution that it delivered. "

True, I think the focus should be on 'real world' features that are useful rather than great engineering feats but result in nothing beneficial when the rubber hits the road. With that being said, there still needs to be more work done on responsiveness. I have Fedora 8, for example, and when I try to run something heavy CPU utilisation I find that the responsiveness when browsing and downloading websites slows dramatically.

Small things like that need to be fixed. Yes, I know it isn't explicitly related to the ext4fs, but at the same time, this has to do with the over all need to refocus by Linux developers on what affects the end users on a regular basis.

Wait a minute, isn't ReiserFS also a real 'killer' FS?

Oh sorry, that should have been 'alleged killer' FS.

You know, sys admins are also users... why make the distinction...

Because users aren't (all) also sysadmins. It's like saying "squares are all rectangles, so why make the distinction?" Just because squares are all rectangles doesn't make them the same thing.

Edited 2008-03-10 23:17 UTC

Doubt it.
Don't forget that adding ext4 to F8 will also require a long list of package updates: e2fsprogs, system-config-lvm, util-linux, initscripts, parted (and friends), etc.

In general, once FX+1 is released, most of the development resources are put into the current (FX+1) and the next (rawhide) version while the previous version (FX) enters an unofficial maintenance mode. (A rather reasonable decision - people who rather use an older version [F7] - do it because they want a stable/aged release and rather not test new features.)

- Gilboa

Many people disagree and seem to have had problems with XFS according to comments online. (I can't find and remember the exact web links just now but a search for "problems with XFS" brings lots of results in Google. Of course, the same probably with other file systems too, however...:P)

New journaling versions of the ext file systems (3 & 4) are meant to be reliable. And rock solid reliability is by far the most important feature a file system can have IMHO.

I don't know what exactly would be the major benefits of xfs over ext3 or ext4? As far as I can remember to have read XFS failure handling could be improved, the file system cannot be shrunk, some operations can be slow etc.

I've seen many people hype the supposedly much better performance of XFS (or ReiserFS, Reiser4 and other file systems) compared to old ext-based file systems. But according to real tests there seems not to be huge performance differences between the journaling file systems in Linux (ext, reiserfs, xfs jfs). In some tests some file system may be slightly faster and in other tests the others may have a small benefit.

Personally I would trade a debatable tiny amount of extra file system speed for greater reliability anytime. Anyway, a lot of the talk concerning file systems seems to be based on subjective feelings mostly.

When push comes to shove, XFS is just not that great. It's an early 90's filesystem that carries a seemingly unshakable mystique because Silicon Graphics originally created it. But it's old, not a good fit for Linux, and of the Linux filesystems is the most likely to trash your data after any sort of unexpected shutdown. It's pretty fast if you are streaming large data files to or from a very fast raid array. That's about it. Otherwise, you might as well use a more reliable filesystem.

JFS is pretty good, but has been completely abandoned. My understanding is that it has no maintainer at all these days.

Ext4 is a necessary successor to ext3. And I'm hoping that btrfs will be the next logical step. Let's try to move forward through the 21st century and not backwards into the 20th.

Before all the insanity around Hans, my money was on ReiserFS as being the next-gen linux filesystem.

Such a shame.

By "insanity" do you mean his inability to work with the kernel devs, or the... err... legal complications which came later?

Reiser4, with its redundant, DIY, vfs layer, was a poorer fit for Linux than was XFS. Add to that, Namesys' stock in trade was to develop fast, release shoddy, make up the rest with hype, and abandon the code once it was accepted into mainline. And a lot of folks bought into the hype because they wanted to. Especially the Reiser4 hype.

Give me a tried and true, if a bit stodgy, ext3/4 for a while longer. And then, if all goes well, btrfs looks very interesting.

Edited 2008-03-11 01:44 UTC

Yeah, I was referring to the almost surreal story around his wife's "disappearence"

I guess I was one of the people that bought into the Reiser4 hype. The idea that I liked the most was the extensability through plugins idea. So if you wanted some bit of functionality integrated into the filesystem, you could just code against their API instead of having to learn all the internals and whatnot.

ext3 is really not a bad FS by any means, it just isn't whiz-bang exciting. This is actually the first time I have heard of BTRFS, but it looks very promising. I worked against ORACLE 9i as a developer for about 3 years, and I will never forgive them for the hell that was learning PL/SQL. But if they manage to pull something like this off and open source it, that will go a long way.

XFS deletes large files faster than the other filesystems. For desktop use, this is trivial; for a dedicated server like MythTV where the average file is 1.8Gb or larger and files are being deleted constantly while other disk-intensive activities are going on, it is not trivial.

It's irritating that the alternate install versions of Ubuntu can correctly create/format an XFS partition but the regular liveCDs have not been able to for at least three major versions.