Comment by nisa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nisa | Hacker News Reader

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Made the mistake using btrfs for a Hadoop cluster at university in kernel 4.x times after reading that SLES uses it and after reading an interview on lwn with someone important, I think the maintainer at that time - that deemed it stable. This must be 10 or 12 years ago or so and it was a wild ride - crashes, manual recovery on 200 machines using clusterssh to get the partitions to mount again. Got out of disk space errors on a 16tb raid 1 (which is not a real raid1) with 5% usage - lot's of sweat I'd rather avoid. Should have just used ext4 in hindsight.

For me I decided to not touch it anymore after that experience. I'm sure there is a name for that bias but I don't care. Got burned badly. Lots of people had probably similar experiences and that's were that coming from. Reading the mailing list archives at that time might also be useful to convince yourself that it was more than anecdote.

I’m not disputing any discourse relating to the factual in/correctness of the anecdote, I’m pointing out that gp is providing an anecdote while disputing anecdotes that they don’t agree with.

Provide actual data that’s recent. Linux 4.x was what, 10 years ago? Cars are substantially safer now than they were 10/20/50 years ago, so whose to say your experience with a file system would be different?

Same could be said about cars: Why ever buy a [insert brand] again after you've been burned by its reliabity or other issues?

You probably just don't, as the alternatives are good and plenty.

> You probably just don't, as the alternatives are good and plenty.

Which cannot be said about file systems on Linux which support metadata+data checksum and repair though. As far as I'm aware the only file systems which could realistically be used are btrfs and zfs (bcachefs looks promising but not there yet). Zfs is not even a part of the kernel and you have to compile it yourself and hope it does actually compile against your kernel due to API changes.

True dat.. :-)

Just wanted to point out, that it is "normal" for people to avoid the thing that did not work out for them in the past.

It's unfortunately a very common anecdote over the last 10 years (and a similar experience to my own). And to be honest, it's a red flag with how this critical system component is being developed.

What changed with respect to car safety compared to 2014? If anything, the recent trend of putting every control in touchscreen interfaces has made cars less safe.

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