Remix.run Logo
danudey a day ago

As someone who's used btrfs and zfs, btrfs today is still a pale imitation of what zfs was at launch. btrfs feels like people wanted to make a filesystem which had all the 'pretty neat' features of ZFS but without the tightly coupled management and benefits of ZFS (like volume management + RAID + encryption + compression all being managed through one tool).

btrfs ended up being basically a consumer version of a few of ZFS's most visible features - transparent compression, subvolumes, and copy-on-write - which then farms out the other most useful features - RAID + volume management + encryption - to the existing tooling. Makes sense for a smaller-scale project, no shade, but it definitely misses the mark if you've spent time on ZFS systems taking advantage of what ZFS has to offer (like recursive snapshots or vdevs).

ghaff a day ago | parent [-]

I don't know the whole history of btrfs (although its primary maintainer was I think at Oracle at one point) but ZFS was definitely built from a hierarchical storage enterprise mindset.

Given different historical circumstances, it could probably have picked up more traction. But not sure what would change today even with an Oracle licensing change.