It has some features that zfs lacks such as a dedup story that is actually usable, plus more flexibility in reshaping. Other than its native raid 5/6 story what major features is it lacking in comparison to zfs? I agree the tooling is trash compared to zfs (zfs command line is a delight by comparison). Also stability wise i haven’t noted problems in years. Not to take anything away from zfs which has proven itself in its particular use cases, but btrfs is alright.
> Also stability wise i haven’t noted problems in years.
Counter anecdote: I have a laptop (single disk) running opensuse tumbleweed with root on btrfs, and it's managed to completely break its root filesystem twice. One of those times I tried to recover it, but in the end I just reinstalled.
Not that I know the exact hardware and circumstances, but in my experience that sounds like a hardware issue, either a buggy controller or a failing disk.
Zfs -with it's similar checksumming and integrity features- would likely have faced similar issues.
It happened months apart and I never saw it report data errors. It could still be hardware, of course (I haven't tried to run ZFS on the same hardware), but even if it was a hardware fault this isn't an impressive failure mode. Like... what are the odds that a random hardware bug breaks BTRFS metadata in such a way that I can't even mount the filesystem, and never just breaks random files such that I get an isolated read error?
Agreed, btrfs has been stable for a long time, aside from RAID5/6, which are going to be uncommon on a laptop or desktop computer. Unfortunately, 10 years ago this was definitely not the case, and btrfs hasnt been able to shake off that reputation among some people since then.
> Other than its native raid 5/6 story what major features is it lacking in comparison to zfs?
For example, native at-rest encryption. dm-crypt/luks is adequate, but has significant performance problems[0] on many-core hardware with highly concurrent storage (NVMe) due to excessive queuing and serialization. You can work around these things by editing /etc/crypttab and maybe sysctls.conf, but the default is pretty broken.
Per-dataset properties, including different compression policies, exec/noexec, setuid/nosetuid, case-sensitivity, volumes, and snapshots that actually make sense.
It does have one huge advantage, you can have a deduped btrfs filesystem without using any extra RAM - and you can run the dedupe process "offline" when the system isn't busy, instead of having it run all the time in real time. For many uses, that is an absolute killer feature.
Ubuntu Desktop has zfs rollback in GRUB for several releases now for root on zfs installs. The only problem is the boot pool will eventually be full after several upgrades :(
Needs to much maintenance imho. Are there distributions that do this better out of the box? I’ve read Manjaro does something similar?
