[PVE-User] BTRFS...

[Pongrácz István]

----------------eredeti üzenet-----------------
Feladó: "Lindsay Mathieson" 
Címzett: "PVE User List" 
Dátum: Wed, 3 Feb 2016 06:58:15 +1000
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> Why not ZFS? its a lot more mature than btrfs.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Lindsay Mathieson
> 


Hi,

Exactly.

My preferred usage is with the latest Proxmox:
- ZFS on HDD/SSD (log+l2arc cache) tuning and contains the rootfs, too
- ZVOL as virtual hard drive for kvm guests
- btrfs on the ZVOL - the only reason is the simple CoW feature, which supported by the mainline kernels and able to install almost any distributions onto btrfs (or convert ext3/4 to btrfs)

My experience is, comparing zfs to btrfs, zfs is much more comfortable and simple to use, more mature and used in heavy production for a looong time, even some guys still consider not-production-ready (anyway, it is a PEBCAK, not zfs fault).
Btrfs only used to provide CoW feauture, otherwise all other features of btrfs could be turned off, because zfs will protect it well enough: checksum, compression. 

Some benefits of btrfs are: 
- supported on 32 bit systems, 
- rootfs on btrfs supported without any tricks 
- and I think all new kernels support it out of the box.

Otherwise btrfs is not my favourite, due to 
- its difficult commands, 
- how it implements subvolumes and the whole layout, 
- missing low-overhead compression (lz4),
- incompatibilities with older kernels (imagine that, your development workstation has a new kernel, while your embedded system has older btrfs and you format a new SD card with btrfs, which will be not supported by the old system)
-I had something strange "balance" problems in the past with btrfs and I had to do voodoo tricks to get it work again after googling out the solution
- my opinion, it is still experimental even I plan to use it in zvol

Bye,
István