Free Software Linux

"I wasn't planning on releasing v0.12 yet, and it was supposed to have some initial support for multiple devices. But, I have made a number of performance fixes and small bug fixes, and I wanted to get them out there before the (destabilizing) work on multiple-devices took over," explained Chris Mason regarding the 0.12 release of his new btrfs filesytem. Btrfs was first announced in June of 2007, as an alpha-quality filesystem offering checksumming of all files and metadata, extent based file storage, efficient packing of small files, dynamic inode allocation, writable snapshots, object level mirroring and striping, and fast offline filesystem checks, among other features. The project's website explains, "Linux has a wealth of filesystems to choose from, but we are facing a number of challenges with scaling to the large storage subsystems that are becoming common in today's data centers. Filesystems need to scale in their ability to address and manage large storage, and also in their ability to detect, repair and tolerate errors in the data stored on disk." Regarding the latest release, Chris offered:

"So, here's v0.12. It comes with a shiny new disk format (sorry), but the gain is dramatically better random writes to existing files. In testing here, the random write phase of tiobench went from 1MB/s to 30MB/s. The fix was to change the way back references for file extents were hashed."

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