Chapter 4. Btrfs
The B-tree file system (
Btrfs) is a local file system that aims to provide better performance and scalability. Btrfs was introduced in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 as a Technology Preview, available on AMD64 and Intel 64 architectures. The Btrfs Technology Preview ended as of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 and will not be updated in the future. Btrfs will be included in future releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, but will not be supported in any way.
Btrfs Features
Several utilities are built in to Btrfs to provide ease of administration for system administrators. These include:
- Built-in System Rollback
- File system snapshots make it possible to roll a system back to a prior, known-good state if something goes wrong.
- Built-in Compression
- This makes saving space easier.
- Checksum Functionality
- 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.
