btrfs in FreeBSD

abhay4589 · Dec 30, 2012

Is there any chance that btrfs from linux kernel would be included in FreeBSD kernel itself?
(In near future.)

break19 · Dec 30, 2012

No. We use the real thing: ZFS, not the offbrand crap called BTRfs.

Several linux people all got together and said "We wish to be cool and use ZFS, but we can't include it in the kernel since we are morons and made the kernel GPLv3. So we must now write our own version of ZFS that sucks, has fewer support, and is much less robust. Plus we need to make it a pain in the ass to manage, like all other linux utilities, like systemd and pulseaudio"

So no. Not likely to ever be supported outside of linux. Kinda what happens when linux people get their hands on things. They do everything they can to make it difficult to use outside of linux.

abhay4589 · Dec 30, 2012

I know it's not as robust but it has one promise that's It will continue to be developed for longtime.

xibo · Dec 30, 2012

Just as ZFS will be continued to be supported by the FreeBSD and Illuminos communities.

A BTRFS subsystem is extremely unlikely to become part of the FreeBSD operating system, however a third-party module that implements it might be written somewhen (depending on how influent BTRFS becomes or whether someone volunteers to do it independent of it's influence).

UNIXgod · Dec 30, 2012

abhay4589 said:
I know it's not as robust but it has one promise that's It will continue to be developed for longtime.

Just in case you didn't know. BTRFS is still considered experimental; even on linux. You may want to wait it out for now unless your just curious and want to hack around. As for other non native filesystems FreeBSD has support for just about all of them.

neowolf · Dec 30, 2012

break19 said:
No. We use the real thing: ZFS, not the offbrand crap called BTRfs.

Several linux people all got together and said "We wish to be cool and use ZFS, but we can't include it in the kernel since we are morons and made the kernel GPLv3. So we must now write our own version of ZFS that sucks, has fewer support, and is much less robust. Plus we need to make it a pain in the ass to manage, like all other linux utilities, like systemd and pulseaudio"

While I agree that ZFS being here basically removes the need for btrfs, there's no sense in going on a mini rant on unrelated projects. Also if you really care that much about licensing, it'd help to get it right. The Linux kernel is explicitly GPLv2 and is refusing to go to v3.

vermaden · Dec 30, 2012

abhay4589 said:
Is there any chance that btrfs from linux kernel would be included in FreeBSD kernel itself?
(In near future.)

What for?

We have something that BTRFS is based on and tries to reinvent it poorly - ZFS.

But, as FUSE works on FreeBSD maybe some day BTRFS will be available via FUSE.

throAU · Dec 31, 2012

abhay4589 said:
I know it's not as robust but it has one promise that's It will continue to be developed for longtime.

Remains to be seen. BTRFS has a number of design issues when it comes to trying to replicate ZFS functionality and still isn't stable.

OP: I wouldn't recommend BTRFS on Linux either. If you want the features of ZFS, just use ZFS. It is not going anywhere and is available on more different platforms than BTRFS or even EXT4 (Solaris. OpenSolaris variants, FreeBSD, OS X).

abhay4589 · Jan 1, 2013

BTRFS is supported by SUSE commercially.
I use ZFS for everything.
I didn't want to start religious war here in anycase

gkontos · Jan 2, 2013

Porting a new filesystem requires developers get involved. FreeBSD is free and most projects are being sponsored. That doesn't mean that those resources are free too. So, in order for something like this to happen there must be a very good reason for it.

Like others mentioned, FreeBSD has ZFS. Despite the recent, or not so recent, developments with Oracle shutting down OpenSolaris, there is still a lot of work going on with ZFS.

ZFS is a full production file system and it has been tested for a few years now. It would make no sense at this point to focus on porting a new file system, that is really not stable for production, rather than improving ZFS.

SUSE Enterprise Linux might claim that their product is production ready but this remains to be seen. And don't forget that their investing money on this on a OS that is not free nor open source.

No religious wars, just plain logic...

UNIXgod · Jan 3, 2013

abhay4589 said:
BTRFS is supported by SUSE commercially.
I use ZFS for everything.
I didn't want to start religious war here in anycase

It's not religious. Have you seen HAMMER? Might be something you may want to evaluate if your interested in modern file systems.

abhay4589 · Jan 3, 2013

Yes, I have used HammerFS but only Lab testing though.
Nice but since it's not available in FreeBSD hesitant to implement it in Production systems.

vertexSymphony · Jan 5, 2013

It's being developed by Oracle, it's nonportable, has a lot of design flaws, its unstable even in it's own native platform, is GPL'ed (with the difficulties that this poses to have it commited to -HEAD) and we have something that's actually the opposite to all that.

WHY, just WHY someone in it's right mind would actually prefer btrfs having ZFS natively? It's like wanting to eat dirt while you have a barbecue on your table.

If that thing is ever ported for interoperability reasons (see ext4fuse), it will just run on FUSE and be a second class citizen unless Oracle provides something stable, tested, portable (platform properly abstracted) and dual licensed.

I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Regards.

tanked · Jan 5, 2013

I say the more file systems we have the better, but I would prefer that the FreeBSD project put its resources in porting HAMMER first before btrfs. Linux already has a read-only port of HAMMER, perhaps FreeBSD should wait and port HAMMER 2 when its available:

http://apollo.backplane.com/DFlyMisc/hammer2.txt

http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2012-December/017716.html

throAU · Jan 19, 2013

abhay4589 said:
I know it's not as robust but it has one promise that's It will continue to be developed for longtime.

There's no guarantee it is going to be supported any more than ZFS is.

abhay4589 · Jan 19, 2013

Almost every company that "supports" Linux that has well laid out plan for supporting it.
I am under no illusion, I am aware that ZFS is technically more advanced and mature FS.
Just had an idea thought I would share it and that's it.

wblock@ · Jan 19, 2013

abhay4589 said:
Almost every company that "supports" Linux that has well laid out plan for supporting it.
I am under no illusion, I am aware that ZFS is technically more advanced and mature FS.
Just had an idea thought I would share it and that's it.

And it's a valid question. A few of the responses were unnecessarily rude.

As far as btrfs, there is no technical reason it could not be ported. It's just the practical reasons: someone would have to need that port bad enough to work on it, and continue working on it because btrfs is still developing and there will be frequent changes. A VM running Linux would let FreeBSD access a btrfs filesystem. Or who knows, the code might be written for portability and easy to get working on FreeBSD. The nice thing about FreeBSD is that if you care about something enough, you can make it happen.

vermaden · Jan 19, 2013

abhay4589 said:
Almost every company that "supports" Linux that has well laid out plan for supporting it.

Have You even tried to use SLES support?

I haven't, but I have used Red Hat support ... and its generally useless.

With simple problems 1st-2nd result from Google search is a solution.

With advanced problems like clustering for example, I had a feeleing that they learned more from me then that then helped me.

... and that was PREMIUM support btw.