I don't think it will compete with ZFS or BTRFS (e.g. I don't think ppl will use GEFS over ZFS or BTRFS for a storage server), but it's a modern, much needed FFS replacement.
btrfs fans use the "you're using it wrong" excuse a lot.
I recall a failure mode that activated when you fill the FS to 100% and their response was "you should never fill a filesystem to capacity"
Tradeoffs are a bitch, bitch.
You should be able to dd /dev/zero to a file and not worry about the entire filesystem shitting the bed.
Also, some failure modes are worse than others. The failures known as DI (data integrity) are the worst. Even though they aren't expected to happen to everyone at a certain frequency (because, again, mature storage software is comparatively very reliable), even a single DI error that happened to any user sets up a major alarm.
In the storage industry, the running joke is that after first DI in your product you lose funding, after the second DI you loose the product.
And it did happen to Btrfs quite a bit... I've seen it with my own eyes when a system didn't come back after power failure. (But I'm in the business of testing software storage products, so, it's less surprising that it happened to me).
So... it's perfectly plausible that you have never seen Btrfs fail, and it's been more error prone than eg. EXT4. The error rate is low enough so that if you don't actively try to cause the error you will never experience one. But, over a large group of diverse use patterns, the rate is still worse than expected.
Famous last words. Most failures are not reported, because people move on.
In my experience, btrfs is actually more reliable than other filesystems due to its checksumming abilities, but when it does fail, it's much harder to fix than with other filesystems (which will often try to continue on even when stuff is broken).
I did.
> I'm using zfs [...]
ZFS is primarily used on single-storage appliances.
From what I understand single copy setups, RAID 1, and RAID 10 never had the same problem. It's left a bad taste for a lot of people though.
Very early ext4 versions also had some data loss or data corruption, but I never hear people dismiss it completely for that brief spot of its history. Maybe part of that is because it was around 17 years ago and it's been a reliable default OS for many years now.
Running ZFS since it was originally released on Solaris (June 2006) with zero problems (then FreeBSD, then Linux), including on RAID-5/6 (RAID-Z1/2) configurations, which btrfs still does not recommend using all these years later:
* https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#raid5...
What have the btrfs developer(s) been doing for the last decade(+) that the code is still of debatable dependability?