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Jo-Erlend Schinstad
Asked: 2011-09-03 07:01:34 +0800 CST

What is the current situation with BtrFS and 11.10?

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It feels like I've read about BtrFS forever, but there has always been something that makes me not want to use it. But I'm guessing things are improving, so I'd like to know what the situation is currently. That means in 11.10.

  • Do we have tools to fix a broken BtrFS? I've read that this has been a problem for a long time.
  • Do we have GUI apps to take advantage of the cool features of BtrFS, like cloning, snapshots, COW, RAID, etc?
  • Do we have user friendly tools to convert an Ext4 into a BtrFS?
  • I've read about performance issues in some cases. Is that still an issue?
  • Have I missed an important question?
11.10

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    BtrFS is under develpment, don't use it for critical data.

    We do have tools to fix broken FS for some time. See apt-cache show btrfs-tools. This package contains also btrfs-convert for converting from ext3. I don't know about ext4.

    I don't know about any GUI tools for that but I don't expect any GUI tool for COW feature. It happens under the hood.

    With regards to performance see this article.

    I don't expect Ubuntu 12.04 to use BtrFS as a default FS since 12.04 is to be LTS and BtrFS is too young.

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  2. What are the chances that it can be used by default in 12.04? I am asking for qualified guesses here, since obviously, nobody can really know what the future has in store.

    According to some notes from an Ubuntu Summit earlier this year (Notes should also be available at summit.ubuntu.com, but the page is protected):

    As far as when Ubuntu will likely deploy Btrfs as the default Linux file-system for new installations, that probably will not occur until Ubuntu 12.10 due to Ubuntu 12.04 being a Long-Term support release where Canonical is much more conservative about making invasive changes.

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