OpenSUSE 13.2 To Use Btrfs By Default 91
An anonymous reader writes "OpenSUSE has shared features coming to their 13.2 release in November. The big feature is using Btrfs by default instead of EXT4. OpenSUSE is committed to Btrfs and, surprisingly, they are the first major Linux distribution to use it by default. But then again, they were also big ReiserFS fans. Other planned OpenSUSE 13.2 features are Wayland 1.4, KDE Frameworks 5, and a new Qt5 front-end to YaST."
Have they fixed the need to manually rebalance? (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using btrfs on all my machines/laptops for more than 2 years now. I've never had corruption or lost data (btrfs has actually coped rather well with failing/dying disks in my experience), unlike ext4. COW, subvolumes and snapshots are nifty.
But too many times I've had the dreaded "no space left of device" [kernel.org] (despite 100GBs remaining) when you run out of metadata blocks. The fix is to run btrfs balance start /volume/path - I now have a weekly cron job on my non-SSD machines - but it's hugely inconvenient having your machine go down because you're expected to babysit the filesystem.
Recent months of Docker usage has made me encounter this condition twice this year already.
I'll continue using btrfs because I've experienced silent corruption with ext4 before which I believe btrfs would have protected me against, and I like snapshots and ability to test my firmware images cheaply with cp --reflink pristine.img test.img.