Btrfs on Alpine Linux

garrit.xyz

1 pointgarritfra3 comments

I thought they pulled BTRFS from Linux kernel a while ago. Is it still even being developed or maintained? Why not ZFS?

It's quite the opposite in fact. BTRFS was pulled INTO the kernel recently. It's seeing massive development and is production-ready.

> Why not ZFS?

The main reason for me is its flexibility. Just an example: Expanding BTRFS is just a matter of shoving in arbitrary disks and rebalancing the existing array. ZFS requires you to plug in drives of the same size to properly scale.

I wrote about this some time ago, in case you're interested: https://garrit.xyz/posts/2021-02-07-storage-setup

I suppose Ive been using ZFS in production for so long and its been so stable that anything that isnt fully distributed wouldnt be a step up for us. CentOS8 had ZFS in the kernel, I think debian still does (ubuntu file servers using AD and SMB does not work well in my experience tho), so it looks like im going to alma or rocky. I guess Ill figure out which file system we will use at that point depending on native support. There are other ways to scale ZFS too but I have also found trying to mix and match drives, machines in a production environment is going to bring its own issues.

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