workstation build -- Is btrfs viable?

[Brad Alexander]

Is anyone using btrfs in day-to-day operation? I'm going to be rebuilding my workstation, probably this weekend, and I was wondering if it was a viable alternative to ext4. It appears to have a lot of useful features, but if it isn't stable, I'll stick with ext4.

Thanks,
--b

[Andrei Popescu]

See https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/

Kind regards,
Andrei
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[Roger Leigh]

I have been using it, and in practice it works well. However, I
would be reluctant to trust it too much at this point.

- it still lacks a fsck tool. If you do have a problem, there is
no means of repairing the damage, and the chance of losing data
is high
- it's still classed as experimental
- the performance is good for some workloads, but awful for others;
in particular fsync is expensive, and the performance of dpkg is
abysmal in comparison with ext3/4


Regards,
Roger

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[Brad Alexander]

Thanks all.

Between the comments on this thread and the review if Mint 12 I heard on DistroWatch Weekly this week, where the reviewer tried btrfs, I think I'll be sticking to ext4 for the time being.

--b