On Thu, 16 Jul 2015 06:08:26 PM Andrew McGlashan wrote:
ZFS on BSD for sure, but btrfs on Linux ... probably better and will be much better yet. The big risk, as far as I am concerned, is that it relies too much on specific kernel versions and of course it relies upon Linux too. For a number of reasons, I would be happier if this was also available in the BSD world.
BTRFS doesn't inherently rely on kernel versions (as opposed to things that require binary kernel modules). It is however a project that's in active development with new features being added. If you need a new feature (such as RAID-5/6) then you need a kernel new enough to support it. If you make a filesystem with support for recent features then it can't be mounted on an older kernel (EG a filesystem made with mkfs.btrfs from Jessie can't be mounted with the Wheezy kernel). BTRFS isn't alone in this regard, we had the same issues when Ext3 and Ext4 were released. The difference is that it was always possible to make a filesystem in the older format. I can run mkfs.ext3 on a Debian/Jessie system and mount the filesystem on fairly old kernels without problem. I presume that BTRFS will get similar backwards compatability at some future time. But at the moment the focus is on features. ZFS on Linux has DKMS modules which makes upgrading kernels painful and risky. But it does have better forwards and backwards compatability in other ways. On Thu, 16 Jul 2015 08:28:40 PM Brian May wrote:
I have always heard people say ZFS is better, Oracle should support ZFS not btrfs, etc. Don't know what to think myself.
ZFS is a more mature product, but it's just a matter of time before BTRFS matches that. BTRFS supports more flexibility in devices, EG "RAID-1" arrays of varying numbers of devices of varying sizes. But ZFS has more features for high-end use such as L2ARC and ZIL. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/