Category Archives: BTRFS

Introduction to Btrfs

I have been waiting for the video presentation of a talk given by Chris Mason at this year’s Scale 10x to finally be posted online. The original Scale 10x talks were streamed live, and the website claims that the videos will be posted online soon, however at this point no date has been provided.

In the meantime however, I found a link to another talk given by Chirs, this time hostsed at linuxfoundation.org. In order to view the full video you do need to provide your name and email address, but the process is painless and well worth the 30 seconds it takes to fill in the form.

It appears as though this was put together in December 2011, so it is relatively new and up to date, provides a nice introduction to btrfs, a look at the upcoming feature set, and a list of work that still needs to be done in order to make btrfs production ready.

Here is a link to the first few minutes of the talk:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW2E4WgPlzc[/youtube]

XFS: Adventures in Filesystem Scalability

There was another file system talk to come out of the recent Linux.conf.au conference, this one was given by Dave Chinner and was entitled ‘XFS: Recent and Future Adventures in Filesystem Scalability’.

Here Dave discusses some of the historical roadblocks which prevented XFS from scaling as well as it could have, provides some in depth details about how these issue were eventually overcome, shows off some benchmarks comparing throughput and overall scaling using XFS, EXT4 and BTRFS.

Dave finishes up the talk with some discussion about what you can expect next from XFS and then takes some questions from the audience.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FegjLbCnoBw[/youtube]

A tour of btrfs by Avi Miller

Here is a Youtube video of a presentation from this years Linux.conf.au conference given by Avi Miller.  The video talks about the current state of btrfs, some of the upcoming features, and Avi also provides a demonstration of one of the filesystem recovery tools in action.

Here are a a few of the highlights:

  • Lots of performance and stability fixes
  • Lots of code cleanup
  • New compression options (LZO and snappy)
  • Auto file defrag
  • Kernel 3.3 will allow larger block sizes (4k,8k,16k) for better meta-data throughput
  • A ZFS like send/receive is in the works
  • New filesystem checker (btrfsck) should be released by Feb 14th
  • Raid 5/6 code (from Intel) will go into mainline kernel after the release of btrfsck
  • Options exist/will exist to do mixed raid modes for data and meta-data
  • Btrfs will be production filesystem in next version of Oracle Unbreakable Linux

No doubt about it, if you are interested in the current state of btrfs you should check out this talk.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxWuaozpe2I[/youtube]

brtfs: Overview and Performance video

Here is a link to a nice video presentation that was given by Douglas Fuller at LUG 2011. The 25 minute video provides an updated overview of the btrfs feature set, areas in which btrfs still needs some further development, and then goes on to provide some detailed discussion on various benchmarks Doug was able to gather during his time spent with the file system.

The second half of the video features Johann Lombardi going into even further detail about btfrs internals.

Overall a very good talk for anyone who is new to btrfs and wants to get an overview of the features, or anyone who is simply is looking for some specifics in terms of btrfs stability and performance.

Updated Native Linux ZFS benchmarks

Phornix.com just released some updated numbers from benchmarks they took using the recently released GA version of the native ZFS kernel module for Linux. They conducted a total of 10 tests using the ZFS kernel module, Ext4, Btrfs and XFS.

The tests were performed using Ubuntu 10.10 and kernel version 2.6.35 for the ZFS tests,  kernel version 2.6.37 was used when testing the other three filesystems.

It appears that these tests were all run using single disk setups, I think it would be really great if Phornix would also look into providing benchmarks on multi-disk setups such as ZFS mirrored disks vs hardware or software RAID1 on Linux. I would also like to see benchmarks comparing RAID5 on Linux vs RAIDZ on ZFS.  I think these kinds of tests might provide a more realistic comparison of real world enterprise level storage configurations.

More native Linux ZFS benchmarks

Phoronix has published a nice 5 page article, which includes some in-depth file system benchmarks. They tested file systems such as Btrfs, Ext4, Xfs, ZFS-Fuse and the ZFS kernel module from KQ Infotech.

Here is an excerpt taken from the conclusion section of the article:

“In terms of our ZFS on Linux benchmarks if you have desired this Sun-created file-system on Linux, hopefully it is not because of the performance expectations for this file-system. As these results illustrate, this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux is not superior to the Linux popular file-systems like EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS. There are a few areas where the ZFS Linux disk performance was competitive, but overall it was noticeably slower than the big three Linux file-systems in a common single disk configuration. That though is not to say ZFS on Linux will be useless as the performance is at least acceptable and clearly superior to that of ZFS-FUSE. More importantly, there are a number of technical merits to the ZFS file-system that makes it one of the most interesting file-systems around.”

With that being said…I believe that a lot of times when people are choosing to use ZFS as an underlying filesystem for a project, they are not doing so due to it’s reputation as a wonderfully fast file system.  ZFS features such as data integrity, large capacity, snapshotting and deduplication are more likely going to drive your rational for using ZFS as part of your backend storage solution.

Another thing to note about these benchmarks  is that these tests were run on the beta version of the kernel module, and I assume that once the GA version (and source code) is released, there will be plenty of opportunities to try and mitigate some of these concerns as much as possible, however on the other hand you are going to have to live with some of the overhead that comes with using ZFS if you want to take advantage of it’s large feature set.

Btrfs: The Story So Far

Here is a link to a video presentation given by Josef Bacik, one of the 3 lead developers currently working on Btrfs.  This presentation was given at at LinuxCon Brazil 2010.  The video lasts about an hour and according to the description provides:

‘A look at the features that currently exist in Btrfs and what features are left to be done. We’ll look at stability and what things testers need to look out for. There will be plenty of benchmarks and use cases for the different features of Btrfs. We will also discuss what testing needs to be done, and how testers can help us developers.’

If you have some questions about the current state of Btrfs, current and future Btrfs development roadmap,  benchmarks, etc… you should take some time to watch this video.

Current state of “Btrfs” File System for Linux

Oracle has provided  a link to a webcast (registration required) on the state of Btrfs given,  by lead Btrfs developer Chris Mason.  Here is an excerpt from the webcast description:

‘Join Chris Mason, Director of Software Development at Oracle, the principal author of Btrfs flie system, and our own resident Linux kernel guru, as he discusses the development, features, benefits of the “Btrfs” file system (pronounced “Butter F S”, “B-tree F S”) in Linux.’

The video lasts about 1 hour and provides a very good overview of the current state of the file system, some of the pros and cons of Btrfs under various workloads, some of the features that have been implemented thus far, as well as some of the tools and features that a slated for future releases.