System information

Chapter 4. Btrfs

Btrfs is a new local file system under active development. It aims to provide better performance and

scalability which will in turn benefit users.

Note

Btrfs is not a production quality file system at this point. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 it is at

a technology preview stage and as such is only being built for Intel 64 and AMD64.

4.1. Bt rfs Feat ures

Several utilities are built in to Btrfs to provide ease of administration for system administrators. These

include:

Bu ilt - in Syst em R ollb ack

File system snapshots make it possible to roll a system back to a prior, known-good state if

something goes wrong.

Bu ilt - in Co mp ressio n

This makes saving space easier.

Ch ecksu m Fu n ct io n alit y

This improves error detection.

Specific features include integrated LVM operations, such as:

dynamic, online addition or removal of new storage devices

internal support for RAID across the component devices

the ability to use different RAID levels for meta or user data

full checksum functionality for all meta and user data.

⁠Chapt er 4 . Bt rfs