Btrfs and the Ubuntu spin machine

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 25 May 2010 14:56

Opinion and Analysis

Alone among GNU/Linux distributions, Ubuntu has managed to project the impression that it is the best first choice for someone who wants to test the Linux waters. Put this down to slick media management.

The management does not end there: the folk at Ubuntu are also very good at keeping the distribution's name in the headlines.

A recent case that illustrates this is the blog post about the btrfs filesystem by Ubuntu developer Scott James Remnant. The post was headlined "btrfs by default in Maverick?", the reference being to the next release of Ubuntu, Maverick Meerkat.

This headline has been repeated in various publications around the net and I've been waiting to see if anyone will have a second look at Remnant's post and dissect it in detail.

Nobody has bothered to do this, even though the post is all of 10 days old. Nobody has bothered to even recall that it was only very recently that ext4 became the default filesystem in Ubuntu. Why would one want to make what is a major change so soon?

If one reads carefully through what Remnant has written, there are lots of riders attached. Some of the conditions he lists are the removal of the "experimental" label on btrfs (which is expected in the 2.6.35 kernel release), and support for using btrfs with GRUB2.