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Date: Fri, 8 May 2009 20:40:18 -0700
From: Andrew Sharp <andy.sharp@onstor.com>
To: Narayan Venkat <narayan.venkat@onstor.com>
Bcc: Brian Stark <brian.stark@onstor.com>
Subject: Re: BTRFS
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On Fri, 8 May 2009 20:12:07 -0700 Narayan Venkat
<narayan.venkat@onstor.com> wrote:

> When do you think this will become a robust and reliable file system
> for Linux?  How much run time does it have today?

Extrememly hard to tell.  Here's the whole scoop: today it's not ZFS.
How soon could it be?  Conventional wisdom (Jonathan) would say 6
years, but what could upset that is the current development paradigm
for Linux kernel development, the likes of which the world does not
have experience with.  The pace is shockingly fast, and it could go
even faster.  The giant companies backing Linux and btrfs could also
be game changers: if IBM and Oracle and Google and Yahoo put btrfs
on a couple of 100k machine clusters and test it, who knows, it could be
quite upsetting to the status quo.  And then there's our own possible
development input.  Which is nil, of course, unless some money appears.

Couple of things I noticed about btrfs v. ZFS is the general speed is
faster in btrfs, but it's "young" in many places, including testing with
NFS/CIFS sharing it.  I am speaking of my experiences with ZFS on my
laptop with a USB drive v. my experiences with a USB drive on my
workstation, so not really apples and apples, but interesting anyway.

I've not been mentioning btrfs to anyone except fellow kernel developers
and close co-workers.  I don't think we should mention it to suitors
except maybe in passing so they know we're up on things.

Cheers,

a
