Thread

Btrfs/ZFS/bcachefs under workloads classic benchmarks skip

179 points · 190 comments · farlight

blop · 1789845579 · focus · HN ↗
I think the reviews should also include the social aspect of these filesystems...
There is and have been many promising and exciting FS to replace the old boring ones, but for storage you not only want to avoid technical issues but also maintainer(s) drama...
1. koverstreet · 1789847441 · focus · HN ↗
  Why do people keep bringing up drama?
  The community infighting has sucked, but that's a thing that matters primarily for maintainers.
  I think most users just want something that works.
  1. Skunkleton · 1789847853 · focus · HN ↗
    Related username?
    To answer the original question, most people who care about their filesystem at all care about its stability. Not just "does it work now" but also "will it work and improve over time". Infighting puts the future at risk.
    koverstreet · 1789848382 · focus · HN ↗
    It really does.
    But you might want to check out the bus factor on btrfs too; when a maintainer says "but we've saved Facebook billions and billions of dollars!", calls for the other filesystem maintainer to be ejected from the community, then quits to join Anthropic a month later - that's not a vote of confidence.
    I'd be very happy if people could just stop bringing up drama and us factors. We put it behind us a year ago, but it seems not everyone got the memo.
    nolist_policy · 1789888554 · focus · HN ↗
    Checking the bus factor:
    Btrfs regulars:
    - 1 from Meta
    - 1 from Oracle
    - 4 from SuSe
    - 2 from WDC
    bcachefs:
    - Kent Overstreet
    throw0101a · 1789903157 · focus · HN ↗
    And Btrfs still does not have a RAID-5/6 that they themselves recommend for usage:
    * <a href="https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#man-btrfs5-raid56-status" rel="nofollow">https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#man-b...
    What have they been doing for the last decade(+)?
    farlight · 1789906633 · focus · HN ↗
    Other things: since no companies sponsoring its development had any interest in raid 5/6, which is mostly a home enthusiast thing.
    Western Digital picked up this work last year and is slowly getting through the new design without the write hole, I think we'll see working raid 5/6 in the next year or two.
    throw0101a · 1789911785 · focus · HN ↗
    > Other things: since no companies sponsoring its development had any interest in raid 5/6, which is mostly a home enthusiast thing.
    I've used RAID-Z1/2/3 at a couple of jobs: yes IOps is suck-y, but if it's for backups of other systems, or the central logging server, or network monitoring (Suricata, Snort), sometimes your priority is cheap/bulk.
    I'm currently in the HPC space, and Lustre is a thing here, and it has tiered storage via policies: you can (e.g.) put your recent/hot data on NVMe, but older/colder bits on spinning rust on ZFS.

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