On Sun, 4 Nov 2012, Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au> wrote:
I've subscribed to linux-btrfs-owner@vger.kernel.org mailing list, just to have an idea as to what is going on .... patches keep on coming and other issues crop up too often as well. I'm not ready to use BTRFS on anything yet myself. In time I do hope it turns out to be a better option than ZFS. I wish that there weren't any licensing issues with ZFS code living in the Linux kernel because I love ZFS on Solaris and I don't want to use ZFS via FUSE -- nor do I want to use BSD kernel (which is another possibility with Debian).
One major problem with ZFS is the way it manages memory. It's supposed to be possible to keep it's memory use down by limiting ARC size, but that doesn't seem to work as designed. My experience is that a zfsonlinux system with 4G of RAM and light load was giving kernel panics due to memory allocations failing. While it's relatively cheap to add heaps of RAM on new systems it's still an annoyance and this prevents the use of ZFS on small systems. So while I could probably upgrade my Thinkpad to 8G of RAM and ZFS but it's a lot easier to keep the current 5G and use BTRFS. It's possible that the FUSE option would improve things, presumably the user- space ZFS code run by FUSE would be pageable and therefore the memory allocation problems wouldn't be as bad. But FUSE has other issues and I'd prefer not to use it. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/