My personal grievances with btrfs are multifaceted.
- I never agreed with the btrfs default of root raid 1 system not booting up if a device is missing. I think the point of raid1 is to minimize downtime when losing a device and if you lose the other device before returning it to good state, that's 100% on you.
- Poor management tools compared to md (though bcachefs might be in the same boat). Some tools are poorly thought, e.g. there is a tool for defragmentation, but it undoes sharing (so snapshots and dedupped files get expanded).
- If a drive in raid1 drops but then later comes back, btrfs is still quite happy.
- Need of using btrfs balance, and in a certain way as well: https://github.com/kdave/btrfsmaintenance/blob/master/btrfs-... .
- At least it used to be difficult to recover when your filesystem becomes full. Helps if you have it on LVM volume with extra space.
- Snapshotting or having a clone of a btrfs volume is dangerous (due to the uuid-based volume participant scanning)
- I believe raid5/6 is still experimental?
- I've lost a filesystem to btrfs raid10 (but my backups are good).
- I have also rendered my bcachefs in a state where I could no longer write to the filesystem, but I was still able to read it. So I'm inclined to keep using bcachefs for the time being.
Overall I just have the impression that btrfs was complicated and ended up in a design dead-end, making improvements from hard to difficult, and I hope that bcachefs has made different base designs, making future improvements easier.
Yes, the number of developers for bcachefs is smaller, but frankly as long as it's possible for a project to advance with a single developer, it is going to be the most effective way to go—at the same time I hope this situation improves in the future.
- I never agreed with the btrfs default of root raid 1 system not booting up if a device is missing. I think the point of raid1 is to minimize downtime when losing a device and if you lose the other device before returning it to good state, that's 100% on you.
- Poor management tools compared to md (though bcachefs might be in the same boat). Some tools are poorly thought, e.g. there is a tool for defragmentation, but it undoes sharing (so snapshots and dedupped files get expanded).
- If a drive in raid1 drops but then later comes back, btrfs is still quite happy.
- Need of using btrfs balance, and in a certain way as well: https://github.com/kdave/btrfsmaintenance/blob/master/btrfs-... .
- At least it used to be difficult to recover when your filesystem becomes full. Helps if you have it on LVM volume with extra space.
- Snapshotting or having a clone of a btrfs volume is dangerous (due to the uuid-based volume participant scanning)
- I believe raid5/6 is still experimental?
- I've lost a filesystem to btrfs raid10 (but my backups are good).
- I have also rendered my bcachefs in a state where I could no longer write to the filesystem, but I was still able to read it. So I'm inclined to keep using bcachefs for the time being.
Overall I just have the impression that btrfs was complicated and ended up in a design dead-end, making improvements from hard to difficult, and I hope that bcachefs has made different base designs, making future improvements easier.
Yes, the number of developers for bcachefs is smaller, but frankly as long as it's possible for a project to advance with a single developer, it is going to be the most effective way to go—at the same time I hope this situation improves in the future.