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by ariabuckles 2021 days ago
Both openSUSE and [as of very recently] Fedora use btrfs by default, so btrfs support seems pretty stable these days.

(But as others have pointed out, there are options for using zfs on linux, too)

2 comments

Attempting to use zfs for the root partition is a huge headache because the software lives in the supplementary `filesystems` repo. https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/filesystems/zfs

1. It often happens that the main repo offers a new kernel, but the corresponding module is not ready on obs yet. This means upgrading to the latest rolling release cannot just happen at any time, but requires careful planning. This is a big inconvenience.

2. In the past dracut sometimes just failed to pick up the module for the initrd, causing a boot failure at the next system start. I could not figure out why, however this never happened with the first class supported ext/xfs.

3. The distro's boot/rescue media do not contain the driver. This means a third-party boot medium is required to go into a broken system, and repairing it when chroot is involved is now much more complicated because of the different distro.

btrfs was a really underutilized filesystem. It still has some superior features to zfs (such as offline deduplication), but the momentum now is clearly with zfs.