On 8 November 2013 18:17, Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> wrote:
The options I'm considering at the moment are using Oracle Linux for the Dom0 and using Debian for the Dom0 with an Oracle kernel. Both of those should be good for running BTRFS and Xen. Debian with an Oracle kernel will make kernel upgrades a little painful but it means I don't have to change the rest of the OS configuration (I've run Debian systems with CentOS kernels before). A complete Oracle OS will work well together but it means I have to change everything to a different OS, admittedly that won't be so hard as the Dom0 does little other than managing DomUs and running MySQL.
Any suggestions?
Consider Ubuntu Server? It's similar to Debian, so you'll find it easier to get the hang of it; however it tends to have more active maintenance on the stable releases and tracks closer to current versions of software and the linux kernel. You'd probably want the LTS (Long Term Support) version, but more recent kernels are backported for it in the official repos, so you can have a recent kernel version for good btrfs support. Patches are backported by the Ubuntu team into the kernels too. Ubuntu has supported btrfs for quite a while now, and it seems to work well - at least I've been running btrfs filesystems for a while with no issues. I've tried ZFS for a while as well, but came to the same conclusion as you have -- that it's just a bit too flaky and a bit too much bother if the subset of features you actually want are available in btrfs. tjc