分类： IT业界
2010-01-24 15:18:15
JL What are the key features in btrfs that people are looking for?
CM One important part about Btrfs development is that we wanted to focus on features and not strictly performance. It is important that we perform well, but we wanted to make sure Btrfs had features that other Linux filesystems could not easily provide.
The biggest single feature is the copy on write snapshotting, which is actually the basis of most of the other advanced features in the FS. Btrfs snapshots are writable and can be snapshotted again.
Data and metadata checksums are also a key part of making sure we can administer the storage over time. We need to be able to detect when the disk is giving us the wrong data, and try to correct it by grabbing data from another mirror or sending a command down to the disk array to ask for another copy. This command doesn’t exist yet, but we do plan on adding it to the Linux software raid stack at least.
Managing multiple devices inside the filesystem is what gives Btrfs very flexible storage management. Devices can be mixed in size and speed, and over the long term Btrfs will do the right thing to optimize access. Raid levels can also be mixed, using different stripe sizes for data and metadata etc.
