To paraphrase the upstream opinion, btrfs has been "almost production ready" for many years now, but never quite got to the stage where it actually was ready.

In the meantime, many of the features that btrfs provides are now available via other more mature and stable storage technologies like ext4, XFS, LVM, etc. We've put considerable effort into improving these technologies to the point where current Red Hat offerings already cover almost the entire btrfs feature set.

If you have a specific need which btrfs meets but you believe the Red Hat storage offering doesn't meet, then as the docs say, get in touch. I see your account has a Principal Solution Architect assigned to it, they will be glad to hear from you and can discuss implementation with storage/filesytem engineering as required.

I would take NTFS read and write support as a replacement! +1 for ZFS support.

For anyone still following this topic, you may have seen that RHEL 8 beta includes the new Stratis system for managing storage features. It uses existing technologies, which we feel are more mature and stable and reliable, to provide many/all of the features that btrfs/ZFS provide.

The upstream project has some docs located at: https://stratis-storage.github.io/

Our own beta documentation is located at: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8-beta/html/configuring_and_managing_file_systems/managing-layered-local-storage-with-stratis_configuring-and-managing-file-systems

Hi, I'm still following this topic and I will have a look at Stratis in the RHEL 8 beta if I find the time. I'm afraid RHEL 8 will be released until I could take a look. ;-)

Thanks for the information you provided. Joerg

According to the RHEL 8.0 Beta release notes Stratis is not marked as a technological preview. It is only mentioned in the section 'New features'.

Do I read things wrong, but from what I read it appears that stratis gives you a zfs/btrfs like "we do lvm and fs in one tool look" but in the end you just mount plain xfs disks on possibly sparse lvm volumes or am I missing the point? Besides a new management tool, is there any new features in stratis like bitrot detection, subvolumes, deduplication, encryption of subvolume level, etc ?

don't get me wrong. I think having a nice tool to make thin cached lvm with xfs easier for users to set up is a good thing. I just don't feel this is the same level as the features you get with e.h. zfs on linux.

One of the main features we use BTRFS is to remove any bit rot. RHEL8 does not have a means to address this. As devices have got larger it's now not uncommon to have a local filesystem spanning hundreds of TB's. It is almost a certainly that some of your data in this will be corrupt. The only two local filesystems I know that address this are ZFS and BTRFS. I also prefer its built in volume management. In my mind, LVM has become too complex and therefore more likely to suffer missconfiguration. We raise with our Redhat team but it the only suggestion they could come up with was to run Glusters!

Redhat are looking increasingly isolated as the only major distro not supporting either BTRFS or ZFS. They still have no replacement for BTRFS . LVM still has the RAID5 write hole. According to the docs STRATIS does not protect against bitrot, even if it were available as an option.

I've still not seen any real justification for dropping it, particularly now, given the amount of support it is now getting from every one else. It smells of NIH. Come on Redhat, prove me wrong.