[richardkmichael]

If you don't already, I strongly recommend lurking on the btrfs mailing list. There are regular fixes to balancing, ENOSPC, send/receive and the btrfs-progs tools; occasional questions and fixes related to the compression code.

Be prepared to update your kernels and tools often and independent of your vendor. Btrfs-progs will likely need to come from the git repo, so building your own packages for distribution around your production nodes will probably be necessary too.

A word of caution: do not run btrfsck without consulting the wiki and mailing list first, and hopefully knowing exactly what you are doing. There are situations you'll encounter which do not require btrfsck to repair (but rather, other tools instead), and it will potentially make a recovery less likely.

FWIW, I have been watching the list for years, and reading regularly for about 6 months trying to get a sense of stability with respect to the features I want.

I would not put btrfs in production yet. Though, likely soon.. I'd guess another year or so.

[nisa]

Oh my god. The debate was between ZFS and btrfs and although I favored ZFS, the extra kernel module and the upcoming support in distros led to the decision for btrfs. However we won't do anything fancy with it. Basically just using the whole disk for a distributed filesystem without snapshots and we use btrfs because of checksumming and scrubbing weekly/monthly to detect corrupt disks and data and maybe compression with lzo and subvolumes. As far as I understood this should be safe?

New kernels should be no problem as Ubuntu will likely provide an HWE stack in the future and btrfs-tools is inside a well maintained ppa...

Damn' I should have pushed ZoL through.

[richardkmichael]

I wouldn't use ZoL either -- I read that mailing list for quite awhile too, and skimmed most of the issues on GitHub. As of about six months ago, lockups were too frequent for my taste. All the implementations are improving though and the OpenZFS movement is promising. A caution here too: if you use ZFS, all implementations are not equal, you'll need to research the specifics for each platform on which you intend to use it; and the compatibility [with other implementations] if you want to move the file system [to a different platform]. If I was rolling out ZFS, I'd only use it on Illumos/OpenIndiana (vs., say ZoL).

I have been waiting and watching for a long time for most of these "new" filesystem features (pools, fs-level RAID, checksums, send/receive), but I am a "filesystem conservative" (especially in production; less so on my own machines) -- I'll keep waiting awhile longer. On production Linux today, I stay with EXT4 or XFS.