---

MeeGo and Btrfs

“MeeGo is arguably the dark horse in the mobile platform race:
it is new, unfinished, and unavailable on any currently-shipping
product, but it is going after the same market as a number of more
established platforms. MeeGo is interesting: it is a combined
effort by two strong industry players which are trying, in the
usual slow manner, to build a truly community-oriented development
process. For the time being, though, important development
decisions are still being made centrally. Recently, a significant
decision has come to light: MeeGo will be based on the Btrfs file
system by default.

“Btrfs is seen as the long-term future of Linux filesystems,
representing a much-needed clean break from the legacy filesystem
designs we have been using for all these years. With the demise of
reiser4 and the unavailability of ZFS, Btrfs would seem to be the
only contender for that title. But talk about Btrfs is always
framed in “it’s not stable yet” terms, with few people willing to
commit themselves to an actual date when the filesystem might be
ready for production use. It is generally assumed that most
cautious users will spend some years running on ext4 before making
the jump to Btrfs. The 2.6.34 kernel will be released with this
text still guarding the Btrfs configuration entry:

“Btrfs is highly experimental, and THE DISK FORMAT IS NOT YET
FINALIZED. You should say N here unless you are interested in
testing Btrfs with non-critical data.”

Complete
Story

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to Developer Insider for top news, trends, & analysis