Bcachefs Merged into the Linux 6.7 Kernel

• duperemove

  16 662 9.2 C

  Tools for deduping file systems

ZFS now has reflink support, which doesn't require lots of RAM, but isn't done automatically while writing. You need to run something like https://github.com/markfasheh/duperemove

• zfs

  721 10,140 9.7 C

  OpenZFS on Linux and FreeBSD

  

https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/260

I stand corrected, last time I checked they didn't support freeze/unthaw on ZoL, it's always worked on FreeBSD though.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• snapper

  33 830 9.0 C++

  Manage filesystem snapshots and allow undo of system modifications

  

I left SUSE close to the end of 2021, and I had had to reinstall my work laptop twice that year alone. I consider that recent enough to call it current.

> df is not lying

To me, that reads as "df isn't lying because $EXCUSES."

I disagree. I don't care about excuses. I want a 100% accurate accounting of free space at all times via the standard xNix free-disk-space reporting command, and the same from the APIs that command uses so that applications can also get an accurate report of free space.

If a filesystem cannot report free space reliably and accurately, then that filesystem is IMHO broken. Excuses do not exonerate the FS, and having other FS-specific commands that can report free space do not exonerate it. The `df` command must work, or the FS is broken.

The primary point of Btrfs is that it is the only GPL snapshot-capable FS. The other stuff is gravy: it's a bonus. There are distros that use Btrfs that don't use snapshots, such as Fedora.

Some Btrfs advocates use this to claim that the problems are not problematic. If the filesystem is of interest on the basis of feature $FOO, then "product $BAR does not exhibit this problem" is not an endorsement or a refutation if $BAR does not use feature $FOO.

Btrfs RAID is broken in important ways, but that is not a deal-breaker because there are other perfectly good ways of obtaining that functionality using other parts of the Linux stack. If no feature or functionality is lost considering the OS and stack as a whole, then that isn't a problem. However, this remains serious and an issue.

Additional problems include:

• Poor integration into the overall industry-wide OS stack.

Examples:

- Existing commands do not work or give inconsistent results.

- Duplication of functionality (e.g. overlap with `mdraid`)

• Poor integration into specific vendors' OS stacks.

Examples:

- SUSE uses Btrfs heavily.

But SUSE's `zypper` package manager is not integrated with its `snapper` tool. Zypper doesn't include snapshot space used by Snapper in its space estimation.

Snapper is integrated with Btrfs; licence restrictions notwithstanding, I would be much reassured if Snapper supported other COW filesystems.

(This has been attempted but I don't think anything shipped -- https://github.com/openSUSE/snapper/issues/145 . I welcome correction on this!)

The transactional features of SUSE's MicroOS family of distros rely heavily on it. This lack of awareness of snapshot space utilization deeply worries me. I have raised this with SUSE management, but my concerns were dismissed. That worries me.

Red Hat removed Btrfs support from RHEL. As a result it has had to bodge transactional package management together by grafting Git-like functionality into OStree, then building two entirely new packaging systems around OStree, one for the OS itself and a different one for GUI-level packages. The latter is Flatpak, of course.

This strikes me as prime evidence that:

1. Btrfs isn't ready.

Suggest a related project