Development and Issue Reporting
For feature status, please refer to the Status page.
The Btrfs code base is stable. However, new features are still under development. Every effort is made to ensure that it remains stable and fast at each and every commit. This rapid pace of development means that the filesystem improves noticeably with every new Linux release so it's highly recommended that users run the most modern kernel possible.
For benchmarks, it's recommended to test the latest stable Linux version, and not any older, as well as the latest Linux development versions. Also, it's recommended to test the various mount options such as different compression options.
If you find any behavior you suspect to be caused by a bug, performance issues, or have any questions about using Btrfs, please email the Btrfs mailing list (no subscription required). Please report bugs on Bugzilla.
Features
Linux has a wealth of filesystems from which to choose, 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.
Major Features Currently Implemented
- Extent based file storage
- 2^64 byte == 16 EiB maximum file size (practical limit is 8 EiB due to Linux VFS)
- Space-efficient packing of small files
- Space-efficient indexed directories
- Dynamic inode allocation
- Writable snapshots, read-only snapshots
- Subvolumes (separate internal filesystem roots)
- Checksums on data and metadata (crc32c, xxhash, sha256, blake2b)
- Compression (ZLIB, LZO, ZSTD), heuristics
- Integrated multiple device support
- File Striping
- File Mirroring
- File Striping+Mirroring
- Single and Dual Parity implementations (experimental, not production-ready)
- SSD (flash storage) awareness (TRIM/Discard for reporting free blocks for reuse) and optimizations (e.g. avoiding unnecessary seek optimizations, sending writes in clusters, even if they are from unrelated files. This results in larger write operations and faster write throughput)
- Efficient incremental backup
- Background scrub process for finding and repairing errors of files with redundant copies
- Online filesystem defragmentation
- Offline filesystem check
- In-place conversion of existing ext2/3/4 and reiserfs file systems
- Seed devices. Create a (readonly) filesystem that acts as a template to seed other Btrfs filesystems. The original filesystem and devices are included as a readonly starting point for the new filesystem. Using copy on write, all modifications are stored on different devices; the original is unchanged.
- Subvolume-aware quota support
- Send/receive of subvolume changes
- Efficient incremental filesystem mirroring
- Batch, or out-of-band deduplication (happens after writes, not during)
- Swapfile support
- Tree-checker, post-read and pre-write metadata verification
- Zoned mode support (SMR/ZBC/ZNS friendly allocation)
Features by kernel version
As part of the changelog you can also review
Features Currently in Development or Planned for Future Implementation
- DAX/persistent memory support
- The file/directory -level encryption support (fscrypt)
- fsverity integration
Documentation
Guides and usage information
- Getting started — first steps, distributions with btrfs support
- FAQ — About the btrfs project and filesystem
- UseCases — Recipes for how to do stuff with btrfs
- SysadminGuide — A more in-depth guide to btrfs's concepts and a bit of its internals, to answer all those "but what is a subvolume?" kind of questions.
- Multiple devices – A guide to the RAID features of Btrfs
- Conversion from Ext3 and Ext4 or reiserfs
- Problem FAQ — Commonly-encountered problems and solutions.
- Gotchas — lists known bugs and issues, but not necessarily solutions.
External Btrfs Documentation / Guides
Links to Btrfs documentation of various Linux distributions:
Manual pages
- Original wiki documentation (obsolete, will be removed)
Developer documentation
- Development setup - how to build btrfs from sources and prepare a development environment
- Original COW B-tree: Source code in C that implements the COW B-tree algorithms repository. Written by Ohad Rodeh at IBM Research in 2006, and released under a BSD license. This is a reference implementation, that works in user space.
- Unmerged features
- In-band (write) time deduplication
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News
IRC channel at libera.chat
The #btrfs channel is at libera.chat, matrix.org bridge works (persistent room #btrfs:matrix.org).
zstd (Nov 15)
The zstd implementation 1.4.10 in kernel has been merged to 5.15-rc1, speedups and sync with upstream version
btrfs-progs v5.15 (Nov 2021)
- mkfs: new defaults!
- no-holes
- free-space-tree
- DUP for metadata unconditionally
- libbtrfsutil: add missing profile defines
- libbtrfs: minimize its impact on the other code, refactor and separate implementation where needed, cleanup afterwards, reduced header exports
- documentation: introduce sphinx build and RST versions of manual pages, will become the new format and replace asciidoc
- fixes: fix warning regarding v1 space cache when only v2 (free space tree) is enabled
linux v5.15 (Nov 2021)
Features:
- fs-verity support, using standard ioctls, backward compatible with read-only limitation on inodes with previously enabled fs-verity
- idmapped mount support
- make mount with rescue=ibadroots more tolerant to partially damaged trees
- allow raid0 on a single device and raid10 on two devices, degenerate cases but might be useful as an intermediate step during conversion to other profiles
- zoned mode block group auto reclaim can be disabled via sysfs knob
Performance improvements:
- continue readahead of node siblings even if target node is in memory, could speed up full send (on sample test +11%)
- batching of delayed items can speed up creating many files
- fsync/tree-log speedups
- avoid unnecessary work (gains +2% throughput, -2% run time on sample load)
- reduced lock contention on renames (on dbench +4% throughput, up to -30% latency)
Fixes:
- various zoned mode fixes
- preemptive flushing threshold tuning, avoid excessive work on almost full filesystems
Core:
- continued subpage support, preparation for implementing remaining features like compression and defragmentation; with some limitations, write is now enabled on 64K page systems with 4K sectors, still considered experimental
- no readahead on compressed reads
- inline extents disabled
- disabled raid56 profile conversion and mount
- improved flushing logic, fixing early ENOSPC on some workloads
- inode flags have been internally split to read-only and read-write incompat bit parts, used by fs-verity
- new tree items for fs-verity: descriptor item, Merkle tree item
- inode operations extended to be namespace-aware
- cleanups and refactoring
Changelog
Read about past releases in the separate Changelog page
Articles, presentations, podcasts
- Video: Deploying Btrfs at Facebook Scale by Josef Bacik at the Open Source Summit 2020 (2020-06-29)
- Video: btrfs is awesome, except when it isn't by Richard Brown at openSUSE Conferece 2018 (2018-05-25)
- Video: btrfs: The Best Filesystem You've Never Heard Of by poiupoiu at PhreakNIC 21 (2017-11-3)
- Video TUT91782 Getting the most out of the btrfs filesystem by Thorsthen Kukuk and Jeff Mahoney (SUSECON, 2017)
- Video: NYLUG Presents: Chris Mason on Btrfs (May 14th 2015) by Chris Mason at the 192nd meeting of the NYLUG
- Video: Why you should consider using btrfs ... like Google does. by Marc Merlin at linux.conf.au 2015. talk slides
- Article: Bitrot and atomic COWs: Inside “next-gen” filesystems (ars technica, 2014/01)
- Article: Btrfs: Subvolumes and snapshots (LWN.net, 2014/01)
- Article: Btrfs: Working with multiple devices (LWN.net, 2013/12)
- Article: Btrfs: Getting started (LWN.net, 2013/12)
- Article: Btrfs hands on: An extremely cool file system (ZDNet, 2013/11)
- Technical report: Visualizating Block IO Workloads. Section six shows a visual comparison of the IO patterns for BTRFS, XFS, and EXT4. Submitted to ACM Transactions on Storage, November 2013.
- Paper: BTRFS: The Linux B-Tree Filesystem describing the overall concepts and architecture, appeared in ACM Transactions on Storage, August 2013. Includes a detailed comparison with ZFS. There is a free ACM authorized link, from O. Rodeh's [1] page. Otherwise, try IBM Research link
Historical resources
Links to old or obsolete documentation, articles. Kept for historical reasons. Stuff that's more than 3 years old.
Articles, presentations, podcasts
Project information/Contact
Wiki accounts, editing
The wiki contributions are welcome! Please create an account and wait for approval (this is a necessary spam protection and we cannot remove it). You can try to catch some of the wiki admins on IRC (or ping user 'kdave' in a query) to expedite the account creation.
The registration requires full name for account but it's not mandatory from our perspective. The wiki User and User talk pages are created automatically but removed after account is approved. If you want to use the pages, create them manually, they won't be deleted.
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