Re:Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta
by williamstein on Thursday November 15, 2018 @11:48AM
(#18460808)
Indeed, Btrfs is uniquely capable and important. It has lightweight snapshots of directory trees, and fully supports NFS exports and kernel namespaces, so it can easily solve technical problems that currently can't be easily solved using ZFS or other filesystems. Btrfs is also used now for ChromeOS's Crostini Linux application container.
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Notable: Btrfs is used for all of ChromeOS and the crostini container is just another volume.
It's incredibly robust, really confusing why RH would be pulling this.
It was never emphasized, and probably rarely used by their customers. Prior RHEL release used ext4, then xfs by default. People who run RHEL don't want to think about what filesystem to use. They want standard, stable, reliable -- not dozens of options and features.
Re:Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta
by Conan_Kudo on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @01:14AM
(#18492116)
When you're pushing the container stuff, Btrfs becomes extraordinarily valuable. Being able to snapshot a base thing and then layer on top, and do trivial rebasing, as well as cheap replication of container volumes is _very_ useful.
On my Fedora and EL7 systems, I use Btrfs for the OS and for my containers for those purposes. It's awesome.
Slight correction: we use btrfs for the disk image backing the user's crostini state only. The rest of Chrome OS, and the crostini VM rootfs, still use ext4.
bcachefs is another "competitor" to btrfs: https://bcachefs.org/
But Redhat is going all in with stratis: https://stratis-storage.github.io/