[CentOS] Centos 7 and btrfs

[Chris Murphy]

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I don't recommend it for roots. First there are udev, systems, and Btrfs
limitations that prevent automatic degraded boot. Second, any bugs you find
have a really good chance of already being fixed in upstream kernels. Btrfs
has has hundreds of thousands of line changes from a CentOS 3.10 whatever
kernel to a Fedora 4.14.8 kernel.

So if you were to test on Cent OS, at least you'd want to church any bugs
against a current elrepo or Fedora kernel and try to reproduce the problem.
And if it doesn't reproduce, now what? Might as well stick with the newer
kernel.

For data drives, raid 1 is fine. Just be sort aware of the fact Btrfs raid1
is not well named, is not going to behave like mdadm or LVM raid. There are
known issues like no spares, no auto resync if a drive is temporarily
missing and degraded writes happen to one drive, no faulty (kicked out)
drives when they misbehave, etc.

Anyway, Btrfs has been my primary filesystem for roots and data for years.
And I've experienced no unplanned data loss. But I still keep many backups
(up to seven copies, five are independent, the of which are Btrfs based).


Chris Murphy