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BC59
January 15th, 2012, 05:24 PM
Yesterday I spent the day to reformat my Sony Vaio laptop and freshly install the 11.10 (I think it's the tenth time since it's beta release).
Last year I tested Btfrs the "new" Linux file system and it was very fast but extremely buggy.
So yesterday I decided to format my drive to Btfrs. Apart from the sense that everything was slow, the procedure was going ....well, until I started to update the system. After 3 hours of waiting to install the new packages, I gave up and reformatted the drive to ext4.
Finally Btfrs goes from bad to worst.
Any opinions of people tried to do the same?

nmaster
January 15th, 2012, 06:45 PM
not sure why you sound so surpised by the bugs. according to wikipedia, a stable version has "yet to be released"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs

BC59
January 15th, 2012, 07:29 PM
not sure why you sound so surpised by the bugs. according to wikipedia, a stable version has "yet to be released"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs

I'm surprised for 2 things. First as I said, last year Btrfs was faster than ext4 and now is very much slower and secondly I read that kernel 3 augmented it's support to this new file system
http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.0
I don't see any improvement comparing to other kernels.

philinux
January 15th, 2012, 08:46 PM
From what I've read I'd wait till 12.10.

BC59
January 15th, 2012, 09:02 PM
From what I've read I'd wait till 12.10.

I thought so. Looks like the progress is very slow and the results are not very promising. It was scheduled to be ready for the year 2010 and it's postponed now to the end of 2012.

sffvba[e0rt
January 15th, 2012, 09:08 PM
Thread moved to The Community Cafe.

... seeing as it isn't really a testimonial or experience with Ubuntu...


404

FuturePilot
January 15th, 2012, 09:27 PM
Btrfs isn't even finished yet....

Paqman
January 15th, 2012, 09:49 PM
If you don't want to see bugs and regressions, don't install experimental stuff. The whole point of allowing you to install btrfs this early is precisely so that you do find the bugs.

BC59
January 15th, 2012, 10:01 PM
But in this case you don't deal with a bug! It's not a usual program, it's a file system. It's working or not and I have the feeling that is not working.
And don't forget this:

In 2008, the principal developer of the ext3 and ext4 file systems, Theodore Ts'o, stated that although ext4 has improved features, it is not a major advance, it uses old technology, and is a stop-gap; Ts'o believes that Btrfs is the better direction because "it offers improvements in scalability, reliability, and ease of management".
So ext4 is kind of beta as well. But we use it and we expect it should be working.

Double.J
January 15th, 2012, 10:03 PM
I did a default install of SUSE 12.1 with BTRFS. Not really had any desktop user affecting problems yet on my desktop, but the netbook is very slow to load programs such as firefox - around 12 Sec. Of course as it's disk read there's no performance issue once they're up and running - it's just getting them there. I don't have this on the desktop though - but that is a much faster drive?

Just my tuppence!

MadCow108
January 16th, 2012, 01:20 AM
But in this case you don't deal with a bug! It's not a usual program, it's a file system. It's working or not and I have the feeling that is not working.


its not working due to bugs.


So ext4 is kind of beta as well. But we use it and we expect it should be working.

nothing in that text says its beta, in contrary it says its stable due to it only being improvement to old proven technology.

if you want a next generation filesystem thats out of its experimental phase have a look at zfs.

Khakilang
January 16th, 2012, 04:41 AM
I always use trial and tested filesystem. I like ext3 but end up with ext4. Prefer not to waste time re format and re install all those software.

Paqman
January 16th, 2012, 08:43 AM
But in this case you don't deal with a bug! It's not a usual program, it's a file system.

Filesystems are software just like anything else. Btrfs clearly still has some major bugs.



So ext4 is kind of beta as well. But we use it and we expect it should be working.

Ext4 is stable, not beta. What Ts'o meant was that (like ext3 before it) it was merely an iterative upgrade of the previous version, and not a major new filesytem with lots of lovely new technology built it. All the funky new stuff would be going into btrfs (which is probably why it's taking a while to get right).

BrokenKingpin
January 17th, 2012, 06:07 PM
I don't have much interest in it at this point... Ext4 works and performs just fine for me.

FuturePilot
January 17th, 2012, 09:04 PM
So ext4 is kind of beta as well. But we use it and we expect it should be working.

Ext4 is not beta. It's been considered stable for a while now.