[Discuss] Reading Linux book

[Richard Pieri]

Kent Borg wrote:
> I have seen others talking about ext4 being terribly unreliable. I
> didn't know that. If these are reproducible problems, it seems someone
> should put in a good bug report. Linus must think it works if he lets it
> in the kernel.

It's that ext4 was end of life the moment Theodore Ts'o checked in the 
code so it doesn't have the kind of head-on development that Btrfs and 
XFS have.

> I have seen mention of btfs in this thread. When I first heard about it
> I was very excited but concluded (was told) it was not ready for
> primetime. Mostly the userspace tools were behind. Certainly things have

They've been drastically improved in the past years and they continue to 
be improved. Btrfs itself still has problems, mostly edge cases like 
dying ungracefully if a volume fills up, so while it's entirely usable 
it does require active monitoring. That's what makes it not quite ready 
for prime time. If bitwise data integrity in a large scale production 
environment is a necessity and the coin flip is between Btrfs and ZFS 
then I recommend ZFS. It's the more mature, more stable of the two at 
this time.

Regarding partition layouts, I don't bother with them any more beyond a 
small /boot partition. All other file systems are under some kind of 
volume manager that permits dynamic allocation and sizing.

-- 
Rich P.