The Future RHEL/Centos Filesystem

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simpfeld
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The Future RHEL/Centos Filesystem

Post by simpfeld » 2017/08/02 17:45:58

Interestingly it looks like RH are removing BTRFS from future RHEL releases, from the RHEL7.4 release notes:

"Red Hat will not be moving Btrfs to a fully supported feature and it will be removed in a future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Btrfs file system did receive numerous updates from the upstream in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 and will remain available in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 series. However, this is the last planned update to this feature."

I'm a bit disappointed in this as I'd like features that BTRFS provides (particularly file checksuming), which XFS doesn't have.

Anyone know or have thoughts as to what their plans are?
Enhance XFS or try and license ZFS to be GPL compatible or something else?

Interestingly RH bought a file dedup company today, it's thought they will opensource this technology..
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/0 ... _permabit/

Thoughts or any announced information?

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TrevorH
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Re: The Future RHEL/Centos Filesystem

Post by TrevorH » 2017/08/02 18:28:03

I suspect it more likely that it would be something else. The kernel devs (not necessarily Redhat ones) are working on bcachefs and I hear good things about that. ZFS is unlikely as it has licensing problems.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
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simpfeld
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Re: The Future RHEL/Centos Filesystem

Post by simpfeld » 2017/08/03 13:22:57

"bcachefs" does look interesting.

Looks like Phoronix is covering this:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... at-Project

They seem to suggest that the "Stratis Project" maybe where they are going.

dcrdev
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Re: The Future RHEL/Centos Filesystem

Post by dcrdev » 2017/08/09 15:17:00

This is a bit annoying as this is bound to put things back a bit and any new filesystem will likely incur years of maturing before being production ready, admittedly stratis looks to be an additional layer of abstraction on already existing filesystems so maybe that'll see a quicker turnaround.

As great as bacachefs looks to be it's still very early days and although btrfs has had it's share of problems, it's already had many years of development; to me it seems like btrfs will reach maturity far before any competing products.

I do wish we could dispense with this licensing incompatibility business surrounding ZFS - at the end of the day both CDDL and GPL equate to free software, the whole tough stance thing seems wholly counterproductive. ZFS is a great filesystem - probably not for everyone due to memory consumption, but a great product nonetheless.

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