From the release notes: "The Btrfs file system has been in Technology Preview state since the initial release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. 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."
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterp...
XFS is just not flexible enough, I don't like to be unable to shrink a partition once created.
It looks like I'll be back to ext4 and various kludges then.
That's nice, but the fact RAID 1 still is implemented with critical defects might help understand RH position.
I hope Red Hat will support bcachefs though. I think it's the most promising alternative FS.
The fact btrfs has been yanked from tech preview would tend to suggest feedback has been so bad that they believe it can never make it to being supportable.
At least the random kernel crashes stopped.
With proper care and feeding, it won't run out of metadata either but you need to monitor it closely and run nightly balances. Which probably kill your SSD.
Documentation sucks. Get used to monitor the btrfs IRC channel closely and deduce what to do and what not to do on which kernel version.
It works well for very particular use cases (file server with few random writes and much duplicate data). Cannot recommend it otherwise. Even Docker runs more stable on XFS.
If you have a 2-disk mirror and one disk fails, you can mount the remaining disk one more time to try to recover.
If you try and mount it a second time it is marked permanently read-only and can never be recovered. You need to dump the data and rebuild from scratch.
It's 2017. It's been in development for almost a decade, and getting the simplest RAID case correct hasn't worked.
I ran btrfs for several years, and while the features are great (per-subvolume RAID policies, lightweight snapshots, unRAID-style RAID), I got sick of testing my backups regularly. I wouldn't be surprised if that's not uncommon.