So, there are still behavioral issues here I take it? That is a bummer. This is not news to me, but I thought the situation has changed ever since.
So, the alternative is ZFS only, maybe HAMMER2. HAMMER2 does not look too bad either, except you need DragonflyBSD for that.
As I predicted, out of tree bcachefs is basically dead on arrival - everybody interested is already on ZFS, btrfs is still around only because ZFS can't be mainlined basically
Btrfs has destroyed itself on my testing/lab machines three times during last two years up to point where recovery wasn’t possible. Metadata corruption being main issue (or that’s how it looks like to me at least).
As of now I trust BCacheFS way more. I’ve given it roughly the same time to prove itself as Btrfs too. BCacheFS has issues but so far I’ve managed to resolve them without major data loss.
Please note that I currently use ext4 in all ”really important” desktop/laptop installations and OpenZFS in my server. Performance being the main concern for desktop and reliability for server.
It's generally fine if you stay on the happy path. It will work for 99% of people. But if you fall off that happy path, bad things might happen and nobody is surprised. In my personal experience, nobody associated with the project seems to trust a btrfs filesystem that fell off the happy path, and they strongly recommend you delete it and start from scratch. I was horrified to discover that they don't trust fsck to actually fix a btrfs filesystem into a canonical state.
BCacheFS had the massive advantage that it knew it was experimental and embraced it. It took measures to keep data integrity despite the chaos, generally seems to be a better design and has a more trustworthy fsck.
It's not that I'd trust BCacheFS, it's still not quite there (even ignoring project management issues). But my trust for Btrfs is just so much lower.
source: worked as a support engineer for a block storage company, witnessed hundreds of customers blowing one or both of their feet off with ZFS.
(Legitimate question: I manage several PB with ZFS and would like to know where I should be more cautious.)
There are workarounds, with their respective caveats and warnings.
There were legitimate bugs in ZFS that we hit. Mostly around ZIL/SLOG and L2ARC and the umpteen million knobs that one can tweak.
You can do the same with just about any file system. In the Windows world you can blow your feet off with NTFS configuration too.
Of course there have been bugs, but every filesystem has had data-impacting bugs. Redundancy and backups are a critical caveat for all file systems for a reason. I once heard it said that “you can always afford to lose the data you don’t have backed up”. I do not think that broadly applies (such as with individuals), but it certainly applies in most business contexts.
Can you provide some specifics? So far all I see is vague complains with no substance, and when complainers are lightly pressed they go defensive.
The phrasing of this tends me to believe that the customers set up ZFS in a 'strange' (?) way. Or was this a bug(s) with-in ZFS itself?
Because when people talk about Btrfs issues, they are talking about the code itself and bugs that cause volumes to go AWOL and such.
(All file systems have foot-guns.)
There was a _very_ nasty bug in the ZFS L2ARC that took out a few PB at a couple of large installations. This was back in 2012/2013 when multiple PBs was very expensive. Was a case of ZFS putting data from the ARC into the pool after the ZIL/SLOG had been flushed.
The question was around usage, because without knowing people's usecases and configurations it'll never be usable for you while working fine for others.
As usual with all these Linux debates, there's a loud group grinding their old hatreds that can be decade old.
Is it wrong to ask how to reproduce an issue?
Over the last one or two years I've experienced twice a checksum mismatch on the file storing the memory of a VMWare Workstation virtual machine.
Both are very likely bugs in Btrfs, and it's very unlikely that have been caused by the user (me).
In the relatively far past (around 5 years ago), I've had the system (root being on Btrfs) turning unbootable for no obvious reason, a couple of times.
ZFS is extremely annoying with the way it does extend and the fact that you can’t mismatch drive size. It’s not a panacea. There clearly is space for an improved design.
It clearly is an acceptable one for a lot of people but it does leave space for alternative designs.
[1]: https://hexos.com/blog/introducing-zfs-anyraid-sponsored-by-...
How cynical. It's the kernel maintainer, not the bcachefs maintainer, who does not behave and has a huge history of unprofessional behavior for decades.
Bug fix windows are for bug fix. If it’s not a bug fix, it goes in the next version. That’s how the kernel release cycle works. It’s not very complicated.
If it’s so unstable that it urgently needs new features shipped regularly, I think it’s entirely legitimate that it has to live out of tree until it’s actually stable enough.
it is not like he was not explicitly warned.
https://lwn.net/ml/all/bece61a0-b818-4d59-b340-860e94080f0d@...
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/15/374
That is a reasonable compromise. Except when someone actually snaps back at him.
Don't do RAID 5. Just don't. That's not just a btrfs shortcoming. I lost a hardware RAID 5 due to "puncture" which would have been fascinating to learn about if it hadn't happened to a production database. It's an academically interesting concept but it is too dangerous especially with how large drives are now, if you're buying three, buy four instead. RAID 10 is much safer especially for software RAID.
Stop parroting lies about btrfs. Since it became marked stable, it has been a reliable, trustworthy, performant filesystem.
But as much as I trust it I also have backups because if you love your data, it's your own fault if you don't back it up and regularly verify the backups.
????
> Don't do RAID 5.
Ah, OK, so not FUD
> Stop parroting lies about btrfs.
I seee
In the last 10 years, btrfs:
1. Blew up three times on two unrelated systems due to internal bugs (one a desktop, one a server). Very few people were/are aware of the remount-only-once-in-degraded "FEATURE" where if a filesystem crashed, you could mount with -odegraded exactly only once, then the superblock would completely prevent mounting (error: invalid superblock). I'm not sure whether that's still the case or whether it got fixed (I hope so). By the way, these were on RAID1 arrays with 2 identical disks with metadata=dup and data=dup, so the filesystem was definitely mountable and usable. It basically killed the usecase of RAID1 for availability reasons. ZFS has allowed me to perform live data migrations while missing one or two disks across many reboots.
2. Developers merged patches to mainline, later released to stable, that completely broke discard=async (or something similar) which was a supported mount option from the manpages. My desktop SSD basically ate itself, had to restore from backups. IIRC the bug/mailing list discussions I found out later were along the lines of "nobody should be using it", so no impact.
3. Had (maybe still has - haven't checked) a bug where if you fill the whole disk, and then remove data, you can't rebalance, because the filesystem sees it has no more space available (all chunks are allocated). The trick I figured out was to shrink the filesystem to force data relocation, then re-expand it, then balance. It was ~5 years ago and I even wrote a blog post about it.
4. Quota tracking when using docker subvolumes is basically unusable due to the btrfs-cleaner "background" task (imagine VSCode + DevContainers taking 3m on a modern SSD to cleanup 1 big docker container). This is on 6.16.
5. Hit a random bug just 3 days ago on 6.16, where I was doing periodic rebalancing and removing a docker subvolume. 200+ lines of logs in dmesg, filesystem "corrupted" and remounted read-only. I was already sweating, not wanting to spend hours restoring from backups, but unexpectedly the filesystem mounted correctly after reboot. (first pleasant experience in years)
ZFS in 10y+ has basically only failed me when I had bad non-ECC RAM, period. Unfortunately I want the latest features for graphics etc on my desktop and ZFS being out of tree is a no-go. I also like to keep the same filesystem on desktop and server, so I can troubleshoot locally if required. So now I'm still on btrfs, but I was really banking on bcachefs.
Oh well, at least I won't have to wait >4 weeks for a version that I can compile with the latest stable kernel.
The only stable implementation is Synology's, the rest, even mainline stable, failed on me at least once in the last 10 years.
bgwalter•2h ago
graemep•2h ago
teekert•2h ago
I've been in a similar situation, letting everyone know I was fired. Apparently in the US this has a negative connotation, and they use "being let go" (or something confusing as "handing in/being handed your 2 weeks notice", a concept completely unknown here). Here we only have one word for "your company terminating your employment", and there is no negative connotation associated with it. This can be difficult for non-natives. We can come across very weird or less intelligent.
T3OU-736•1h ago
graemep•9m ago
dbdr•1h ago
> If the above offended anyone, I sincerely apology them.
Unless this was tongue-in-cheek, this kind of proves the point that language was the cause. The apology is a good move in any case.
t51923712•1h ago
The revised version, "Once the bcachefs maintainer conforms to the agreed process and the code is maintained upstream again" is still lecturing and piling on, as the LWN comments say:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1037496/
It is the classic case of CoC people and their inner circle denouncing someone, and subsequently the entire Internet keeps piling on the target.
hebocon•2h ago