Btrfs - Features

Features

As of Linux 3.6 (released 30 September 2012), btrfs implements:

  • Online defragmentation
  • Online volume growth and shrinking
  • Online block device addition and removal
  • Online balancing (movement of objects between block devices to balance load)
  • Offline filesystem check
  • Online data scrubbing for finding errors and automatically fixing them for files with redundant copies
  • RAID0, RAID1, and RAID10
  • Subvolumes (one or more separately mountable filesystem roots within each physical partition)
  • Transparent compression (zlib and LZO)
  • Snapshots (read-only or copy-on-write clones of subvolumes)
  • File cloning (copy-on-write on individual files, or byte ranges thereof)
  • Checksums on data and metadata (CRC-32C)
  • In-place conversion (with rollback) from ext3/4 to Btrfs
  • File system seeding (Btrfs on read-only storage used as a copy-on-write backing for a writeable Btrfs)
  • Block discard support (reclaims space on some virtualized setups and improves wear leveling on SSDs with TRIM)
  • Send/receive (saving diffs between snapshots to a binary stream)
  • Hierarchical per-subvolume quotas

Planned features include:

  • Online filesystem check
  • Very fast offline filesystem check
  • Parity-based RAID (RAID5 and RAID6)
  • Object-level RAID0, RAID1, and RAID10
  • Incremental dumps
  • Ability to handle swap files and swap partitions
  • Data deduplication
  • Encryption

In 2009, Btrfs was expected to offer a feature set comparable to ZFS, developed by Sun Microsystems. After Oracle's acquisition of Sun in 2009, Mason and Oracle decided to continue on with Btrfs development.

Read more about this topic:  Btrfs

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