Comment by cellularmitosis
10 years ago
Perhaps you should take a closer look. ZFS wasn't part of that discussion, and none of the file systems which were discussed have ZFS's feature set.
10 years ago
Perhaps you should take a closer look. ZFS wasn't part of that discussion, and none of the file systems which were discussed have ZFS's feature set.
I wonder how close btrfs is to ZFS. And how exactly it differs.
The similarity is specious. That is, if you look at a feature listing, they look similar. But dig into details and they clearly differ.
Origins: one starts out with proprietary developed functionality and with tons of money in a skunkworks project, using a consolidated team of developers mainly within one company through the fs development and stabilization; the other starts with an idea in a research paper (not called btrfs then because it wasn't an implementation), slow recruitment that'd eventually involve dozens of major companies, and is on a split stabilize and feature development track.
And then if you go back to look at features (commands in particular) in more detail there are some big differences that may or may not affect specific workflows. e.g. btrfs snapshots are unique and independent file trees, in effect there's no distinction between the original and snapshot, both are read-writable, modifying one doesn't affect the other, either can be deleted without affecting the other (ZFS has a distinct parent-child relationship between filesystems, clones, snapshots). Growing btrfs volumes by adding then (at some point balancing, which may be optional depending on the utilization and layout) is a lot easier and faster than ZFS. ZFS offers raid7 (3 parity drives), Brfs does not. Btrfs offers online defragmentation, ZFS does not. ZFS is more stable for $reasons. Really even ext4 and XFS are considered more stable still, although I hesitate to say Btrfs is not stable or unstable. I'd say Btrfs is earning trust, where the others have earned it (with very edge case exceptions, and there simply are more such edge cases for Btrfs still being found and fixed)
So they're actually quite different.