btrfs by default in Maverick?
UDS is over! And in the customary wrap-up I stood up and told the audience what the Foundations team have been discussing all week. One of the items is almost certainly going to get a little bit of publicity.
We are going to be doing the work to have btrfs as an installation option, and we have not ruled out making it the default.
I do stress the emphasis of that statement, a number of things would have to be true for us to take that decision:
- btrfs would need to not be marked “experimental” in the kernel config; we understand that this is planned for 2.6.35, which is the kernel version we are expecting to ship in Maverick.
- btrfs is not currently supported by GRUB2 (our boot loader) or the installer; these pieces would need to be finished before Feature Freeze.
- If that happens, we may make it the default for Alpha releases to gain testing; that testing must go smoothly.
- The btrfs upstream must be happy with the idea.
- We must be happy with the idea.
It’s a tough gauntlet, and it would only made with the knowledge that production servers and desktops can be run on Lucid as a fully supported version of Ubuntu at the same time. I’d give it a 1-in-5 chance.
I’m happy Ubuntu is exploring other file system choices.
Both file sizes and volume sizes will be pressing issues sooner than later.
It seems crazy that I’d ever consider 16TB for files and 1EB a legitimate limitation (as in ext4). But I can see it quickly becoming a issue.
I’d never thought much about de-fragmentation, till I had file systems with hundred of thousands of files, many larger than two gigs.
Or that I would have volumes I needed to resize, with the expectation of *NO* downtime.
Or even having a file server that by default has eight or sixteen cores, And that I could/should/need to leverage them, to improve performance.
SUSE Linux Is Hooking Up With Btrfs Too
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODI2Ng
[...] I see Sam Varghese has cast a critical eye on talk about btrfs in the upcoming version of Ubuntu. [...]
[...] Btrfs tiene un desarrollo muy activo, pero algunas características “finales” no han sido presentadas aún. Puede ser un buen reemplazo apra Ext4 y se le considera estable, pero faltan algunos detalles para mejorar su desempeño. No puede negarse que es un proyecto muy prometedor, tanto es así que va a incluirse en Fedora 13, pero sigue clasificándose como experimental en el núcleo de Linux. Ubuntu 10.10 lo va a incluir probablemente como opción, siempre y cuando se cumplan unos requisitos. [...]