The anti-Btrfs FUD must stop...

If you read the Whackypedia entry on "Butter FS" (Btrfs), you see:

"Btrfs (B-tree file system, variously pronounced "Butter F S", "Butterfuss", "Better F S",^[1] or "B-tree F S"^[2]) is a GPL-licensed copy-on-write file system for Linux. Development began at Oracle Corporation in 2007. It is still in heavy development and marked as unstable"



ewww... SCARY!

But then there´s another view:

https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-japan/bo
---
LinuxCon Japan 2012 | Presentations
"On The Way to a Healthy Btrfs Towards Enterprise"
by  Liu Bo, Fujitsu
---

Let me quote:
"Btrfs has been on full development for about 5 years and it does make lots of progress on both features and performance, but why does everybody keep tagging it with ""experimental""? And why do people
still think of it as a vulnerable one for production use? As a goal of production use, we have been strengthening several features, making improvements on performance and keeping fixing bugs to make btrfs
stable, for instance, ""snapshot aware defrag"", ""extent buffer cache"", ""rbtree lock contention"", etc. This talk will cover the above"
---

From its web "Liu Bo has been working on Linux kernel development since late 2010 as a Fujitsu engineer. He has been working on filesystem field and he's now focusing on btrfs development".

RHEL 7 to get Btrfs support
http://www.h-online.com/open/imgs/45/8/8/4/6/5/1/43-6b4e69889ee000ca.png

"RHEL 7 will support ext4, XFS, and Btrfs (boot and data)"

Then you have SuSE:
https://www.suse.com/releasenotes/x86_64/SUSE-SLES/11-SP2/

"With SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP2, the btrfs file system joins ext3, reiserfs, xfs and ocfs2 as *commercially supported file systems*. Each file system offers disctinct advantages. While the installation
default is ext3, we recommend xfs when maximizing data performance is desired, and *btrfs as a root file system when snapshotting and rollback capabilities are required. Btrfs is supported as a root file
system (i.e. the file system for the operating system) across all architectures of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP2*. "

https://blogs.oracle.com/wim/entry/oracle_linux_6_update_3

"OL6.3 that boots up uek (2.6.39-200.24.1) as install kernel and uses btrfs as the default filesystem for installation. So latest and greatest direct access to btrfs, a modern well-tested, current kernel,
freely available. "

So, again, why does people insist in calling Btrfs "experimental" and "unstable"?. Do you think SUSE and Oracle both ship an unstable FS as a comercially supported feature??.

Sheesh, I´ve lost data with IBM´s "supposedly ´GA´" version of JFS for OS/2 once...

Back to Btrfs... it´s in the mainline Linux Kernel since February so with the adoption by RHEL 7, it´ll become mainstream sooner rather than later...

Here is a good video to get you interested on Btrfs and why it matters...

Just my $0.02...
FC

Reader´s feedback says sometimes I´m not full of sh..

It´s really nice when you write a news story and someone writes back, months later, "from inside" -a big corp- saying "hey you hit the nail on the head".

 Photo courtesy (CC) of Marco Repola @ IStoleThe.TV

I wish that came back more often, but I guess that also means I hit the nail on the head only once a while. ;)

This was my story on Oracle´s decomission of "Sun Download Manager"
http://news.techeye.net/software/oracle-quietly-buries-sun-download-manager

And this the feedback the story got, posted by the SDM product manager Gary Zellerbach:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
12 Aug 00:42

Hi Fernando, I was the co-inventor and Product Manager of Sun Download Manager (SDM) from its inception (~2001) until its recent "retirement." I was surprised to see this article -- frankly, I wasn't sure if anyone had noticed, but obviously you did! 

You seem very perceptive and make some salient points. For the record, I believe the main reason SDM was discontinued was due to lack of engineering resources to update it. As you pointed out, first there was the the desire to rebrand it as "Oracle Download Manager." More importantly, as you also noticed, was the lack of HTTPS support, which was not a problem on the Sun Download Center, but meant that SDM simply did *not* work with Oracle's primary product download site. That was a serious issue. 

To be fair, there was interest expressed in updating SDM and a desire for Oracle to have a good download manager for its customers, but when push came to shove, it was deemed there were higher priority needs for the download engineers. Soon after SDM was retired, my brief stint at Oracle came to end as well. I understand the need to prioritize resources but did not agree with the lack of communication. I wanted to post a blog with a heads-up and explanation about why it was being discontinued. But I was advised not to by my management, as it is company policy not to pre-announce product changes. The most I could do was to insist that customers not get a 404 when hitting the former SDM web pages, and so I got a redirect put in to the FAQ you saw. 

Now I see the redirect appears to have been removed too. (BTW, while the redirect is gone, the FAQ is still available here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/indexes/downloads/sdlc-faq-091624.html ) I can't disagree with much of your editorial perspective, though hopefully my comments help fill out the background.

I don't know Oracle's future plans as to whether they'll ever offer another download manager. I do know, though, that SDM had a great run, was downloaded and used literally millions of times, saved Sun a ton of money on bandwidth and support costs over the years, and was a great example of Java programming. Thank you for noticing it disappeared. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

What can I say, thanks to you, Gary, for the kind words and taking the time to write back, confirming some of my perceptions from afar.

FC